No Filter after Fifty………….
Snapshots of a Colorful Life
We all have to start somewhere. I had a blog on Blogger about fifteen years ago. It seemed like the thing to do. What did I have to write about that was so interesting? Well, nothing really. I wrote to let my emotions out. I was in an unhappy marriage and couldn’t talk to my husband about anything. It made him uncomfortable and he turned my feelings around to his feelings. I ended up blogging in a private blog which later ended up to be the basis of a book I’ve written about life post divorce. Still shopping it around and making improvements.
“Show me, don’t tell me” is what my critics would say after reading a chapter or two. You’d think, as a photographer, that would be easy to do. I show people with my photographs all the time. How could I change my thoughts to be a verbal photograph? I thought about what I am seeing when I take a photograph: the light, the texture, the lens, the composition and the MOMENT. The change of thought process from photographer to writer wasn’t too hard when I looked at it from that perspective. I could describe those things in my chapters. Photography comes naturally to me. When I edit young photographers’ work, I need to remember that “seeing” the best photo may not come naturally to them. I also need to remember that I’ve been doing it for forty years ( I started in high school). If I’d started writing back then, more that just my diary which is painful to read now, I may have the skills in writing that I have in photography. I still remember my senior thesis, “Marilyn Monroe’s affect on Henry Miller’s writing”. Did my desire for seeing an author’s influences fall by the wayside when I took up photography in earnest? Things have come full circle and now I would rather discuss writing rather than photography. I still love both but I have so much more to learn about storytelling with words and not pictures.
This blog is as much of a work in progress as my website. I’m learning, always learning.
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Nell Carroll Photography 