Slow down and stay awhile

While living in the South I learned something important about photography that has relevance and application to real life: I learned to slow down and stay awhile. Taking things more slowly, a decidedly Southern sentiment (and for some, the butt of many jokes about the South) is no joke, and I am once again introduced to it as a way to live. This does not seem like rocket science, but it is damn hard to do. It is not the way I operate. I am the kind of person that approaches something full force - I want to tackle it, achieve it, check it off my list and move on. I guess you would say I am a closer. I used to see something I wanted to photograph and I’d jump right in – snap snap snap. And then I’d walk away. This approach has great merit in many of the things that I do. But perhaps it is not always the most effective.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some things in life that we must move quickly on but there are others that bear taking more time. I find that when I spend time with a subject that I am photographing, see it from different angles, walk around, get closer, get farther away, and maybe stay with it a lot longer than is comfortable, I end up with something amazing. Similarly if I am able to go back to a place where I’ve been before I find that I get something unique every time. Just a small change in the sky, the light, the weather can make the biggest difference.

And so when I noticed last evening that the sky was phenomenal about an hour before sunset – lots of puffy clouds that make for amazing photographs – I decided to go back to the farm where I’d been the day before. In the past I might have looked for a new spot having felt that I had “been there, done that.” But in keeping with my life lesson relearned, I decided to go back and spend some more time in a place I’d already finished with. I stayed longer than I really wanted to, twiddled my thumbs a bit, walked around for different angles, got some of the same angles as before and stayed until the sun no longer was visible in the sky. I think the result was worth it.

When I first noticed the sky.