a keener silence

Wally Lamb

Last night was the opening of the weekly SOMOS Summer Writers Series. The guest was Wally Lamb! (everyone comes to Taos eventually). He is personable and approachable and read a long chapter from his upcoming book, We Are Water (due out in October). It was essentially a self-contained piece and could easily stand on its own as a long short story. I look forward to reading the book. The Harwood Museum Auditorium was packed and no one made a sound during the whole reading. He is an amazing writer who sustained the tension, foreshadowing, and positive and negative aspects of his character. A woman. If you've read any of his books, you know he can get into the head of a woman and write from there. Perhaps because he grew up with sisters (as he told us), or because he has worked for many years with women incarcerated in the York Detention Center in CT. It was good for me to get away for a couple of hours as Ron rested, preparing for surgery in a few days. It helped me feel less like the graffiti character I encountered this morning on my walk.

snapcrone

The air was cool and fresh as I walked the park paths with an inexpensive new Lumix camera, deliberately taking shots I might have ordinarily passed up. I want to give it a good test run before deciding if I should keep it. It certainly has limitations, but as an alternative to a cellphone camera (so convenient that it's addictive), its 16 mps seem to do a nice job. It's quite light and compact - a prerequisite for me when I begin every day by tossing a camera into my smallish purse, ready, not for "serious" photography, but for photo sketches. I just can't deal with heavy on my shoulders in order to collect those doodles.

I've been reading the blog of Olivier Duong, a young photographer who wrote about what he calls Limitation Creativity, which translates to Gear Minimalism (read: you don't need the most expensive camera and lenses to get good photos). He asks: "Is photography still about photography, or it it the camera? The less you have the more creative you will be, the more you love your camera the more willing you will be to learn and shoot, therefore improving." I like this. It's what prompted me to experiment with this little DMC-SZ3 (with a Leica lens) that costs less than a nice handbag. I agree with Duong that photography for some of us is a lifestyle, and we are all too susceptible to the latest "hot" cameras (me).

It's a lesson in observation and mindfulness that yields surprises when I can "shoot a lot, even when there's nothing to shoot".