Author Archives: dkrashb

The Small Things

Posted by dkrashb on
Poppy wrapped in a bow
Does anyone know what this is? Seeing it in the park a lot this year.
Busy Bee

Thursday night, I stayed up late getting my gear together for an early morning shoot. I hoped to sleep in until 6AM. But this was a shoot different from my normal fare. And when I’m shooting something new, I dream about it all night and, inevitably, wake up around 4AM. Half excited and half anxious–much like Christmas in childhood: the impatient anticipation of something new and the simultaneous fear of disappointment.

I eventually gave up on going back to sleep and got ready to go at a leisurely pace–after all, everything I needed was packed and ready to go.

Then, it was time to leave. Time to get there early and check out the place in person before anyone else arrived. Time to see if Google Earth was enough of a preview to make choosing a location from the internet possible. And then, it happened. The thing I am unable to learn. The thing I fail at nearly every single day and then turn around and fail at it once again, often even the same day.

My car key was no where to be found.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time reading research on memory, working on improving memory, and observing people losing their memory (and I am not only referring to myself here). What I believe about memory is that:

  1. we are more likely to remember something when we are internally motivated to remember it.
  2. we remember repetitive things better than net-new things. For example, if I put my car key in a certain place every day for months and then stop remembering to put them there and put them in different places every day for a few days, I am going to remember the place I was putting them over and over again first. I will have to reconstruct history from other memories to get to where the latest place is I’ve left it.
  3. remembering to put something in a specific place when I’m done with it is more difficult than remembering where I left it. This is likely a difference in motivation. When I come home, I have no immediate need to use the car key, I just want it out of my pocket. When I am leaving home, I must find the car key or I will be searching for my bike lock key instead.

All of this leads me to question if perhaps I am agoraphobic at some deep, unconscious level. As soon as I get home, I forget that I will have the need to leave again. I misplace the means by which I can access transportation. Is the problem that I (someone who believes I love to travel, go out, socialize, be in the woods) deep down underneath my extroverted shell am terrified to step outside my home? This could put a major damper on going nomad in the future!

I did find my key and make it to the shoot, but I’m not ready to share any of those shots yet. Instead, I’ve shared a few shots of “small things” from an earlier shoot.

Bearing Witness

Posted by dkrashb on
Cedar Waxwing
Brightly back-lit Orchard Oriole Singing
Brown thrasher choking on a mulberry
Common Loon at sunrise
Spotted Sandpiper with an itch
Northern Rough-winged Swallow
Eastern Phoebe
Great Blue Heron–bottom’s up
Green Heron contortionist
Yellow Warbler
Grey Cat Bird
European Starling singing to the rising sun
Osprey

I imagine I look odd walking through the park with my dog, me carrying whatever toy he’s dropped, my camera, a loupe, and a pair of binoculars.  Probably even odder when I suddenly and without warning drop the leash, step on it, pull up my camera and line a bird in my sights all while talking to the dog, encouraging him to stand still while I attempt to capture a bird that is probably backlit, behind layers of leaves, and likely perched on a tree limb blowing in the wind.

I asked myself the other day why I do this.  I mean, what is it about photography I find so appealing that it’s now been a consistent pursuit for enough years I’d rather not add them up?

I think it comes down to this: photography is a recreation of life. There is in any given image a combination of fact and fiction. A bird, for example, looks the way it looks in a final image based on an endless combination of variables. Some of them I control.  Many of them I don’t.  In the end, any image represents one interpretation of a single moment and the odds of getting an identical image ever again are minuscule–just like the rest of life.

In this act of controlling what can be controlled and dealing with what cannot, there are lessons photography offers.  For example, you can see the same thing a multitude of ways and they are all correct.  And then there’s the expansiveness that results from constraints:  you see more looking through the blinders of a camera frame–it’s as if restricting your view causes better vision.

There’s also the inherent paradox of time.  You capture a moment by being completely in the present with a vision of a future image.  But by transforming that moment into an image, creating that vision of the future, you’ve brought with you a moment from the past. It is the only actual form of time travel that I’m aware of.

Most importantly, when I shoot, I am listening, looking, feeling, tasting, and smelling with the concentration of a hound dog in the hope of gaining a clue about where my next subject will unfold. Thoughts about the past and future get pushed aside, making space for the possibility contained in the present.

Ultimately, photography is an act of gratitude.  Gratitude for having borne witness to something remarkable–whether it’s a weed being struck by the sun, a puffy cloud that happened to show up just when I was looking, or the sudden appearance of a rare bird.  The desire to capture each of those moments requires appreciation of them as subjects worthy of attention.

In this way, photography gives gifts.  It hands me moments I would not have noticed had I never picked up a camera. Never mind the endless struggles and failures at getting exactly what I envision.  Just having been there, fully there, to witness those moments is enough.

Showing Up

Posted by dkrashb on
Orchard Oriole refusing to come closer so I can get a good shot
Green Heron doing his best to look like part of the tree
Another “tree” pose by a Green Heron
Bluebird with a juicy looking worm on his way to his nest full of hungry babies
Dad downy woodpecker with a beak full of baby food
Hungry baby downy woodpecker looking for his nearby dad
Baby and Dad
Baby’s red cap showing and Dad’s red spot
Great Blue Heron shortly after swallowing a large frog (before I got my camera)
Cliff swallows gathering mud
More mud gathering
The group grows and the swallows continuously flutter their wings as they collect mud
Eastern phoebe with a lost cardboard “sled” drowning in the background
A mud-gathering cliff swallow about to suffer an aerial attack

I remember once, many years ago when I was teaching for a community college prison program, having a conversation with another instructor who was telling me about advice he’d given a student.  He’d told the student, “Just show up.  Showing up is half the battle.”

I was reminded of a student in one of the classes I taught during my teaching certification field experience.  He showed up to class, sat down, put his head down on his desk, and promptly fell asleep.  I asked him if he was feeling OK and he told me he’d been up until 2AM that morning playing video games.  When I asked him how he expected to succeed in school if he didn’t sleep at night so he could stay awake during class, he replied, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

I think this requires considering what “showing up” means in this context.  It doesn’t mean physically moving your body from one point to another and not actually being there mentally.  Showing up means paying attention, watching and listening for opportunity to present itself.  It implies both an awareness and recognition of opportunity.

Even with this revision of the definition, I don’t know if I agree that just being there is 50% of the battle.  There’s also preparedness.  It doesn’t do much good to realize you have an opportunity if you’re not in a position to take advantage of it.

For example, I walk my dog in our neighborhood park 3-4x a day.  I spend this time mostly looking for birds.  I am aware, paying attention, watching and listening for the opportunity to see interesting birds present themselves.  However, I’d really like to get great images of these birds.  Yet, in spite of this desire, 9 times out of 10, I rush out the door with the dog but not my camera.

The opportunity to photograph birds presents itself nearly every time I walk, but only 10% of the time am I prepared to actually capture an image of a bird.

Yet, oddly, I seem to be less likely to see birds when I am most prepared.  This is like seeing that the weather forecast is for rain, taking an umbrella, a raincoat, and wearing waterproof boots only to have the weather turn sunny against all odds.

If we apply statistics to this equation, I think it comes down to this:  I’m going to see birds I could photograph 90% of the time I walk.  If I carry a camera only 10% of the time I walk, the odds that I will actually capture an image of a bird drops to 9 times out of 100.

Like everything else in life, showing up, being present, and being ready have to come together with luck.  The more frequently we do our part, the more frequently our readiness will connect with good fortune.  So, I guess that means I will be carrying my camera a lot more often in the future!

Meet Tom Turkey

Posted by dkrashb on
This chick likes hanging around.
Hopping off the “swing”
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Pastured Penny Chickens
Tom looking dapper in the sun
Self-Portrait (hint: look closely at Tom’s eye)
Tom doing his best to look irresistable
Tom dragging his wings on the ground making a funny raspy, drumming sound that’s presumably very appealing to hens.
Chicken hen checking out Pat’s shoe
Hello, Penny!
A free-range hen hanging out in the woods
Shoelaces are just too tempting
Stalking the shoelaces
Tom and the egg carton

Meet Tom.  Tom is a Bourbon Red heritage turkey who is free-ranging it on a farm in Wildwood Georgia where the grass is green, the sun is bright, and the hens are . . . well . . . at the moment, scarce.  Tom’s Tinas are off sitting on about 20 eggs they laid in a secret hiding spot where the two hens share incubation duties of a combined nest.

What’s remarkable about this story is that Tom and his Tinas participated in the act of procreation without assistance from humans.  That happens to be one of the criteria for a breed of turkey to be considered “heritage”–they have to be able to breed on their own.

But what exactly is a “heritage” turkey?  Perhaps the best way to define a heritage turkey is to say that it is a traditional turkey from back before tradition became to factory raise turkeys who can barely walk, let alone breed.

The criteria to be a heritage turkey are:  mate naturally, have a long productive lifespan, and grow slowly.  By “long” and “slowly,” I presume what is really meant is “longer than” and “slower than” the dominant breed of turkeys used by factory farms.  You can read about it from a better resource at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy website, which I was paraphrasing.

Tom takes the first item on that list quite seriously.  However, after spending about 15 minutes trying to convince Tom that I am not a turkey hen and only being able to divert his attention by offering the distraction of my husband, I wonder if there might be a criteria missing?  I suppose the approach of attempting to mate with anyone and anything until one of those things turns out to be a turkey hen will work as long as the hens are close, but it seems a bit inefficient.

It also made Tom a challenging model when I was trying to get pictures.  It’s hard to hold a DSLR with a heavy lens and press the shutter button with one hand while holding back a horny turkey with the other.  When I squatted down to try to get an eye-level shot, Tom rushed me.  Thankfully, Tom is persistent but not violent.  He just keeps pushing his puffed chest up against whomever has attracted his attention over and over again in this crazy dance of you pushing him back and him pushing forward.  It’s a dance with only one step in two directions.

When we got ready to leave, we pulled an empty Styrofoam egg carton out of the car only to have Tom pull it out of our hands, drop it on the ground, and proceeded to jump on top of it as if it were a Tina.  It was the most remarkable display of species confusion I’ve ever seen.  I guess it’s a good thing that how many attempts it takes a turkey to figure out who to breed with isn’t part of the heritage criteria.

Night Moves

Posted by dkrashb on

The Hunter Museum’s modern addition and the switchbacks of the riverwalk
Picking my camera up during a long exposure netted this fun set of swirls
This one almost looks planned
Playing some more with urban structures and sky
Playing with sky and the underside of an overpass
Between two bridges
More traditional point of view of the water cannons at Coolidge Landing
A different point of view on the water cannons at Coolidge Landing
Sculpture lit with a flashlight
The modern end of the Hunter Museum
Zooming during a long exposure
The heartbeat of the historical section of the Hunter Museum
Ghost of me taken by Stephen Sweat–supposedly there actually is a ghost at the Hunter Museum.

Friday evening I was running late. I needed to finish photographing some guitars for Coop Guitars before I could head out the door. Isn’t that great? “Oh, I’m sorry I’m late. I had to finish up some shooting before I could call it quits tonight.” (I wonder if someone who’s been a full-time pro photographer for a couple of decades would find it amusing to have this as an excuse for tardiness: “Oh, I’m sorry I’m late, I had to finish up a conference call.”)

Even better, what I was running late for was another shoot! A group of adults got together on the riverfront to play with their very expensive toys–or, as I like to think of them, our boxes of crayons.

We met at 7:45 and shot through sunset and twilight and then really went nuts after dark.

Do you remember summer nights when you were a kid when all the neighborhood kids would get together and play hide-and-seek when it finally got dark? We would swear we’d only been playing for a few minutes when parents would suddenly appear out of the dark saying things like “Where have you been that you couldn’t hear me calling you for the past 10 minutes?”

Friday night, no parents showed up to tell us it was getting late. By the time people started realizing they needed to leave, it was after 10PM. Several of us shot on. “Just one more shot” we said to our internal parents reminding us we had other responsibilities.

We swapped tips on getting night time effects. We threw around words like “high-speed sync,” “hyper-focal distance,” “aberrations,” and “stopping down” and we understood each other. We zoomed our lenses at bright bridge lights during long exposures and giggled at the results. We got out flashlights and created ghosts and swirls just for the fun of it.

Suddenly, without warning, it was 11:30PM. I realized I was cold, I’d had no dinner, I’d had nothing to drink for at least 5 hours, and I’d told my husband I’d get home before 11PM. Yet, I still had to convince myself that those were strong enough reasons to pack it up for the night–there were so many more ideas I wanted to try!

Oh, there was also the fact that I needed to get up at 6AM the next morning to teach a workshop.

But feeling that creative spark and losing myself to it for a few hours was a great reminder of what I love best about photography–and life. Getting out and shooting with a bunch of people had the added benefits of both learning from each other and getting to socialize with people with a similar vocabulary.

Equinox

Posted by dkrashb on

I wrote a really long, rambling post of over 800 words and decided it would be easier to just start over.
Here are the pertinent points: my staycation is ending. My 6-month leave is starting. So is my new role of working on my husband’s business and balancing that with my other pursuits like photography and getting myself from adequately healthy to ridiculously healthy.

I immediately feel the need to go on a rant about how long I’ve had a job, been self-supporting, yada yada yada. Basically, the need to justify slowing down, even if only temporarily, as if I have to prove I am deserving of this time.

I have suggested to friends that we should all stop cleaning our houses when we’re visiting each other. Then, we would all just be accepted as we are, clean house or dirty, and we wouldn’t drive each other to keep wasting time pretending that we’re neat nuts for people who are supposed to care more about us than about the cleanliness of our homes.

I suggest we do the same when it comes to using over-work as a way of saying we’re important. Let’s just drop the judgmental tones and patronizing comments about people doing things for fun. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s plenty of research that suggests people who play more are also more creative problem solvers and more effective and efficient at work (and healthier). So, let’s start bragging about making play a priority instead.

The next time someone says, “Oh, I don’t have time to do x,” let’s remind one another that we all have time to do what we choose. Sometimes we’re willing to make the choices to prioritize that time and sometimes we’re not.

In the end, we only get one lifetime (at least in this form, depending on what you believe) to create meaning. A universal truth I keep reminding myself of is that people never regret not spending more time at work at the end of their lives. People regret not laughing more, crying more, playing more, connecting with loved ones more.

So, here I go into the next stage of my journey. Perfectly timed with the spring equinox. What better metaphor than spring to begin anew? I might have liked having 13 weeks of winter to rest and recuperate from the past 30 years, but I suspect not. After all, it can be hard work getting rest.

Staycation

Posted by dkrashb on

Week one of rest and recovery is already behind me. It’s an interesting thing to tell yourself you have two weeks to do only what you feel like doing. There’s a certain restlessness that ensues. Voices in my head tell me I’m supposed to be doing something productive. This has led to signing up for a couple of online classes–one for my future work and the other for enjoying life.

But which class have I spent time on? Well, it’s not the one on enjoyment. Ironically, the topic I’ve been procrastinating is separating self-worth from exhaustion and productivity.

I suspect the idea of not exhausting myself through productivity is scary.

After all, what’s one of the first questions we ask one another when we meet in a social setting? “What do you do?” How many times have we asked that question? How many times have we answered it? How often do we answer with our jobs?

“What do you do?” has all kinds of implications. We don’t ask “What’s important to you?” or “What do you like the most about yourself?’ or “What do you most want to be remembered for?” Can you imagine someone asking you something like that upon first meeting? It would feel far too personal. Instead, we ease our way into finding out what really matters to a person by asking them about their career.

Yet, what do we actually learn about a person by asking about what they do? I think about the mothers and fathers I’ve known who have chosen to stay home with their children in favor of a paid career and their discomfort with this question. Whenever I have blundered into asking a stay-a-home parent what they do, they have usually answered with a self-conscious, “Well, I don’t work. I stay home with the kids.” To which I have inevitably replied, “Well that’s certainly work! There’s nothing easy about your job,” in my attempt to make them feel valued.

Yet even this response points to our cultural expectation that hard work is what makes a person valuable. Acknowledging that parenting is hard work may be accurate, but it still values work first. Imagine if someone said, “I try to do very little. I spend most of my day just being.” Wouldn’t we immediately want to know how to “do” being? What does that even look like?

I have spent the past week spending more time relaxing, but this tends to mean a combination of being more active and then vegetating. I’ve ridden my bike more, walked more, hiked more, done more yoga, done more shooting, and laid on the couch more. I’ve also played a lot of euchre (it’s a card game) on my iPad and napped.

The paradox of letting go of my career identity seems to be that I find other things to do instead. Is this progress? Or am I just distracting myself from deeper truths that can only be revealed in stillness?

Socks and Sandals

Posted by dkrashb on

IMG_4772

I’ve allocated for myself two weeks of vacation before I start working on Coop Guitars. I have decided to spend this time taking care of myself by doing only what I feel like doing.
Today, I felt like riding my bike to a yoga class a 20 minute ride away. So, I rode my bike 20 minutes across town and took that yoga class at 10:30 in the morning–a time I’ve never been free to go to yoga class before.
I breathed through the class with the presence of mind I always want in yoga class but rarely achieve.
As I rode my bike back across town, climbing a hill into a head wind on surprisingly fatigued legs, I wanted the traffic light mid-way up the hill to turn green. I was determined it was going to change. And it did! But it changed to a left turn arrow and I was going straight.
Had I trusted the strength of my will to control traffic lights less, I might have unclipped a shoe from my pedals. Instead, I crashed to the ground in one of those humiliating moments I have become all too accustomed to. On the plus side, I have gotten pretty skilled at falling. I managed to fall slowly enough to only scrape one knee slightly.
This just goes to prove you can’t always get what you want. Not even when you’re on a vacation to do only what you please.
I popped up quickly, hoping to avoid alarming any drivers who were probably wondering how on earth I managed to fall in the first place. I pedaled home surprisingly non-plussed. After all, it was a moment and it was gone.
I returned home to a quiet dog who had been home alone for 2 full hours. This is a new record. My husband returned for lunch at the same time. We sat on the floor with our ecstatic dog running in circles, flopping himself over periodically on top of us, and giving us stinky dog kisses whenever we didn’t move fast enough. We laughed at his antics and sheer joy that we had returned safely.
Then, I felt like walking the dog. I slipped my Chacos over my socks. I felt like wearing socks with my sandals. I walked around the park for the 2nd time today feeling my feet in my socks, warm and comfy. I listened to the frogs singing of spring. I looked for the Flicker calling loudly in a dead tree. I watched a turtle swimming slowly through the wetland. I saw a friend and chatted with her about the joy of walking in socks and sandals.
Then, I made myself a smoothie. Full of goodness–local honey, whey protein, frozen organic berries, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg. Then, I decided I felt like writing a post on a day when I don’t write posts anymore.
It’s funny what can feel like an adventure.

Free Range

Posted by dkrashb on

The girls on their way to greet us

Free Range is defined by dictionary.com as:
1. (of livestock and domestic poultry) permitted to graze or forage for grain, etc., rather than being confined to a feedlot or a small enclosure: a free-range pig.
2. of, pertaining to, or produced by free-range animals: free-range eggs.

Last Sunday, Pat and I delivered bags of sawdust from Pat’s workshop to Pastured Penney’s Free Range Eggs. They have about 500 chicks that love my husband’s sawdust. In a few weeks they will be joining about 400 other hens already enjoying life on a farm where they can forage for food in the grass, the scrub, and the woods.

When we walked out to meet the adult hens, I expected them to, at best, ignore us and, at worst, run from us. I did not expect the greeting we got.

Instead of running from us, the ran to us. They
surrounded us, fascinated with our shoes, pecking at our legs and were intent on untying Pat’s shoelaces. It was hard to walk with hundreds of happy hens hanging at our feet.

There is something magical about seeing well-cared for animals contentedly pecking at the soles of your shoes. I cannot explain it–it is just a sense of rightness with the world that these hens should run across a field, compelled by curiosity, nearly frantic to be the first to discover just what kind of shoes their visitors are wearing.

Having just done something rather extraordinary for me–I decided to take a 6-month leave of absence from work–the sheer joy of these hens instantly became symbolic. Unconfined, unconstrained, free to travel wherever their two feet and wings will take them, they flourish.

I found myself thinking of the difference between corporate hens stuck in tiny cubicles they can barely turn around in and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones to keep them alive and producing eggs in horrible living conditions versus these hens, full of joie de vivre.

I could not help but think of my own range having expanded from the virtual cubicle to the pasture, the woods, and and the world. I have been asked several times now how I feel knowing I do not have to boot up the corporate computer on Monday morning. I’m not sure how I feel yet. But Monday morning . . . well, Monday morning will be the test. That will be the day that everything feels different.

What do I feel? Well, there is the fear of being replaceable, interchangeable, just another laying hen. There is the joy of suddenly owning my own time for the first time in about . . . my lifetime. There is the simultaneous wonder and terror that anything is possible. Free ranging means both endless possibility and endless responsibility. I own my future–at least for 6 months. I am left with no excuses, no hindrances, no scapegoat. I wonder how a corporate hen would feel being let out of her cage for the first time?

Knives and Hearts

Posted by dkrashb on

I haven’t seen any dogwood blooms yet this year; this was March 30, 2012
In 2012, the Bluebirds were busy incubating eggs. They’ve just started building nests this year.
Red buds are beginning to appear, but they were at peak by now in 2012.
Close up of a red bud bloom in 2012

When two people decide to commit themselves to one another and spend the rest of their lives together, it introduces the interesting challenge of living together under the same roof. Every couple I know has a list of things they regularly disagree about, but have adopted different coping strategies. A popular approach is to ignore anything that seems trivial rather than deal with it. These are frequently the things that blow up when least expected.

The big, horrible blowouts that end relationships often happen only after a long accumulation of tiny steps of emotional separation–and it’s as often that “trivial” annoyances result in these tiny steps. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

The trick is to recognize when we’re disconnecting.

The other day, I was emptying the dishwasher. When I pulled out the silverware, I found amongst it my Zwilling J.H. Henckels top-of-the-line paring knife that I purchased at a time in my life when I had very little money. I chose to buy one really good knife instead of an entire set of cheap knives because I wanted something that would last a lifetime.

When my husband and I first started living together, we discovered we had two distinct beliefs about how to wash knives. I had been hand washing them for years. My husband flat out didn’t believe the dishwasher would damage a knife.

As such, for 18 years, I have been periodically annoyed that he puts good knives in the dishwasher. Our debate had always hinged on whether it is damaging to the knives or not. Eventually, I would decide I was being petty given that my husband not only puts dishes in the dishwasher, but he also cooks, does laundry, takes care of the cars, fixes things, etc. Who am I to complain that he puts my good knives in the dishwasher? Until it would suddenly annoy me again.

The other day was one of those days. But this time, for the first time in 18 years, it dawned on me that what annoyed me had nothing to do with whether the dishwasher damaged the knives or not. Rather, the annoyance came from feeling that the action was equivalent to my husband telling me I didn’t matter.

This time, when I asked him not to put my good knives in the dishwasher and he replied “What does it hurt?” my answer was, “Me. It hurts me.” The bottom line is that it’s important to me, petty or not, and it hurts my feelings that respecting something important to me isn’t worth the effort of hand washing a knife.

For the first time in 18 years, there was no debate about who was right. For the first time in 18 years, my husband understood why he shouldn’t put the knives in the dishwasher.

Seeing the look on his face the moment he realized he’d hurt my feelings made me fall in love all over again. It turns out talking about annoyance can be romantic.