Landing with a thud

 Planning vacations is exciting time where you look forward to  arriving in places both familiar and new and exploring.  This is one of the primary goals of vacations is to expand your horizons.   I had soaring ambitions ready to get to work on my new camera now in hand and a year of really working out some of the kinks with my shooting I wanted to push over the limits of my previous trips. Unfortunately life in my personal world  right before  handed me a swift kick  in the gut and it really took the wind out my sails.

 I seriously for the first time I can recall questioned if I should go.  I forged on hoping to use the photography as a therapy to work things out. You the audience can be the judge of if that in fact occurred and that my skills showed a noticeable increase.  I am  of course biased and think there were some camera handling advancements that resulted in a stronger more defined product.

I thought I had learned my lessons last year but just when I thought I was going to hit my stride comes the swift foot in the mouth recently.  So  I'm a little unsure if I should cancel my trip.  What does this have to do with photography? Or with my journey........ everything. Photography in many ways is really about self portraiture. It is what you see when you look out. What hopes, what despair what dreams are you viewing?  The world seen through the lens of your eyes.  The skill comes in being able to  remove the clutter and show it unabashedly. This view into the world is what makes great photography compelling.

 I spent a very long night in Bruges, talking to two filmmakers  about how to show despair in a frame. How can you capture the feeling of being discarded, how do you capture hopelessness and  loneliness. They like me were on a vacation traveling and exploring their feeling about where they were in life.  They were going toward the coast and were trying to work out how do we  distill the story down to its emotional touch points. The problem results if you beat your audience over the head with it  they will just turn away. It should creep up on you like a cold and then seize you like a fever.  We talked about the use of color, the importance of lighting and subject matter  and we went back and forth over the use  people in the frame or not.  In the end we all agreed that the key to it is in the gut.  You got to play it how you feel it. The viewer appreciates the honesty and  can empathize and find his own truth in the story. David Duchemin talks a lot about capturing the feeling in "Within the frame"

Working this exploration of the soul and the art of story telling  is what I did while away on this trip. I hope you enjoy.   To be clear, this is not some dark passage into the the depths of the psychosis, there were moment of levity,  and outright joy.  However you  start to really  look at not just the story your telling but how the story is told.  Your working with  some direction but now you have to pull it all together and make it work  as a unit.  So I pulled  a few of  these shots  together, as the year progresses I will release more from my vault of pictures . As I try to spit out the rest of my teeth and figure out it I will actually go . You will find the short clip of the scenes from Belgium here. If you want to take a deeper look into the frames click here