Journal: Where I'm at

Okay, so reflecting on the photowalk and recent events, I realize I really need to be doing this with other people on some level.

Paul Butzi talks about his small critique group, quoting David Bayles' and Ted Orland's Art & Fear:

Operating Manual for Not Quitting

1. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in progress work with each other frequently.
2. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work.

I thought a bit about that and Butzi's group, and decided to start one for myself. I've received a fair response from the Wichita Flickr group, including a couple professionals, one of which is a photography instructor. Nice, and I'm looking forward to our first meeting. (I'm reading Art & Fear, too... pretty interesting so far, and I recognize myself in it, probably more in my writing than my photography.)

Beyond that, the Wichita Flickr group is really taking off... I suggested that the upcoming photo outing was likely to be in below-freezing weather and proposed something indoors, like a lighting workshop. Before I knew it, we had a space, at least one volunteer model, and several people planning to share lights and knowledge. Amazingly, to me, the primary source is the above-mentioned instructor. I'm sure it's good business sense to cultivate the amateurs, but it sure is generous of him to get involved with us.

And on top of all that, without my mentioning photography at all, one of my co-workers has decided to start a company photo club, since our new HR manager is into photography, as are half of my department. Our first meeting is tomorrow over lunch. We'll see what comes of that... but if the meetings are over lunch, that works out great, because it doesn't cut into my free time.

So all of a sudden, I find myself in the middle of communities forming locally... communities out of which I expect to draw a lot of enthusiasm and energy. This is a good thing.

The Photographer's Eye and the workshop future

The Freeman book is everything I expected. It's a revision of the book I have from twenty years ago... many of the photos and even many of the words are familiar, since I just read the prior book. But there is far more color, it's in a larger format, and it's updated to include digital aspects... panoramic stitching, the recognition that cropping is more easily done and therefor more common. It's a very good book.

But even more so than the original, it's not a "workshop". There are no specific assignments, so if I'm going to use it for my purposes here, I'm going to have to write my own assignments.

But... I'm not going to do that right now. The main point of the workshop format was to get me out and shooting, and it wasn't helping. But now I have an idea for a project that I think will drive me for a bit, if I can manage the weather. More on that later.