My feelings of Suddenly September are slowly yielding to ones of OMG October. I don’t have anything for November yet—perhaps No Way It’s November. But I’m definitely going with Decimated December when the time comes. Combining two common and a bit incorrectly used words relating to the quality of tenness is a fitting end for 2020.
I have more pictures and stories from Iceland to post, so many I’m thinking of adding a new section to this website dedicated to photography from places I’ve visited. I’m sitting on hundreds if not thousands of travel pictures—digital and printed—most of which have never been seen by anyone but me. The work I did on my most recent post was like getting to visit Iceland again—a welcomed feeling of being somewhere else in the midst of an unusual time for travel.
Growing within is sense of interior inevitability. The heat came on in my building the other night. The luscious greens of spring and summer are incorporating more yellows, reds, browns, and purples—this time of year is among my favourite times of the year: it’s the best of so many worlds. And for balance: my least favourite time of the year is the last couple of weeks in winter when all that’s left of the season is mostly sharp, icy brown snow filled with gravel, cigarette butts, and what I always assume is just dog poop.
Earlier in the summer I shared some pictures from inside and around my building. They were all taken with my phone’s camera, but this time I’m sharing some pictures I’ve taken with my new digital SLR. It’s been a while since I’ve had full access to an image’s depth of field and exposure—I have to remind myself a photograph need not always be flat and uniformly exposed. I’d say it’s just like remembering how to ride a bicycle, but that’s traditionally an outside activity. I also remember bouncing my chest off the handlebars of the bike a few times before I actually learned how to ride a bicycle, so perhaps some analogies are best left in the past.
Given the current public health climate, sometimes I feel like I’m conducting surveillance on the outside when I take pictures from the window inside the apartment.
With just a few colour and point of view adjustments now it looks like I’m stalking the outside.
As well as a paper dragon, if you look carefully.
Luna loves looking out the window, and sometimes I’ll watch her as she does. Sometimes she’ll notice.
And sometimes she doesn’t.
Paper dragon number two.
Extreme exterior surveillance mode activated—but I’m still inside.
Brightness abounds.
Even in the darker corners.
Or the unexpected ones.
I’ve been listening to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs again. It’s an older album of theirs—from 2010—but I think it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. It’s one of the few albums I have on record because of how interesting it is. Or have on an LP. Or have on vinyl… —the word choice can be highly age‐dependant, but the words are all referring to the same thing: phonographs—pictures of sound.
We Used to Wait is still my favourite track, but Suburban War is a good one too. Have a listen, if you’d like.