Autumn is my favorite season for a variety of reasons: the cooler, drier air is both invigorating and refreshing, the quality of light is remarkable, at times appearing clearer on even overcast days. Even time feels slower with a more gentle cadence though by mid-November, I wonder how it went by so quickly. Certainly it goes without saying that the foliage change can be magical, even personally restorative.
Many years ago, I attended a photojournalism workshop at what was then called The Maine Photographic Workshops in Camden, now known as Maine Media Workshop located in Rockport, a mere stone’s throw from Camden. Located half-way up the coast of Maine, the town of Camden sits next to Penobscot Bay. I haven’t been back since, so I hope it hasn’t lost its New England charm. It was quaint, quiet and photogenic to be sure.
You can glean techniques and technical knowledge from more places today than back then [now a surfeit of info sits on the web]. Convenience is nice, but for me, being engaged with a like-minded person is all the more rewarding. Levels of inspiration come to me when I visit an exhibition, a gallery or listen to or converse with a speaker whose work clearly validates that person’s passion for his/her choices.
I was fortunate to have heard and seen in person Jay Maisel, Ernst Haas and Dick Durrance. Titans of their craft, I learned more than just technique, but a whole lot more about this passion to see things in a new way, to transcend the connections of light, color, subject, interpretation and meaning. My brain needed to do some real lifting and learning, and was thus able to do so when my soul became the catalyst to assist with that lifting and learning.
I like to think of seasonal transitions as a form of recalibration. It’s more than a reset, because to reset anything is effectively returning to its default state. Recalibration is a nuance in alignment. If I’m not sure of what I’m feeling when I look through a viewfinder, I move a few or more steps to one side or another, as well as toward or away from my subject. Recalibrating.
There are similarities in writing, but they’re a bigger challenge for me to describe. I suppose the very title of this post lends itself to recalibrating: adjust the “color” of your words such as tone, passive versus active voice, even a tweak in aliteration to keep your narrative—and your thinking—interesting.
Autumn just doesn’t land here in the northeast; when it does arrive it’s akin to that sense of belonging, of knowing that your journey—in spite of personal hills and valleys—continues with the expected and as well as the unexpected. I like all the seasons, but fall is the one which captures the zeitgeist of the rest of the calendar. It’s a short period of time, that in its most fundamental form, feels like the comfort food that’s been sorely missing for more than half the year.
Carlo Centeno 