Combining Passions

I’ve made trading one passionate pursuit for another a very nasty habit in my life. This is my first attempt to rectify the aforementioned practice by showing you what it was that took my eye off of the eyepiece.

For as long as I can remember there have been three things that I have always used to keep myself sane:

1) Something to draw/write with (pens, pencils, markers, etc)

2) A camera (motion picture, still, or video)

3) A bicycle.

It’s this last object that has a hold on me currently. For as long as I can remember, bikes have been the best way for me to interact viscerally with the world around me. One of my favorite memories is of my sister spending the better part of the afternoon trying to teach me how to ride a bike by having me balance on the bike standing still. Needless to say (despite her best intentions and the fact that I still can’t accomplish that feat to this day) I got completely frustrated and was about to quit when my grandfather came out to the driveway and calmed me down. He assured me that I could in fact figure it out and offered me only one simple piece of advice:

“If you feel yourself falling, steer in that direction.”

With that and a gentle push down the driveway I was set free to explore the world on two wheels. Now, I’d had a Big Wheel and a tricycle before but nothing as quick and nimble as a training wheel-less Huffy BMX that my mother and the maintenance guys in our apartment building had assembled for my birthday. This was as close to real freedom any seven-year-old was going to get.

So, why has all of this been brought out of the dustbin of history? Because as passions go, my obsession with cycling has been saving my sanity lately. I’ve had a lot more time off lately and doing less introspective and more visceral things has helped stave off any crazy making thoughts of economic peril. Mountain bike rides have been especially helpful in providing stimulating beauty but have also presented a challenge to the ever present photographer in me. You see, I’ll end up in these extremely beautiful places and then only have my little point-and-shoot with me to document said beauty. It’s the equivalent of bring my Big Wheel to race the Tour De France.

Verdugo Mountains

I’ve taken some pretty pictures for sure, but nothing that feels like what I could have gotten, given a better tool to work with. I’ve thought about strapping a more substantial camera to my backpack for a ride or two but after I took a pretty minor spill the other day, I realized that the fall would have been major for anything affixed to my back. Thus, the more time I spend on my bike, the less time I’ve had to do any serious picture taking and I’ve been spending a lot of time on two wheels lately. A problem with very little downside health-wise but my artistic self is feeling a bit flabby from lack of mental and soulful exercise.

The only way I could see quelling any kind of artist versus athlete dichotomy raging inside was to give both sides of me something fun to do. Why not get something great to look at and fun to ride? The solution?

It’s not the fastest bike I’ve ever had, but that’s not the point. It’s not the latest and greatest technology either, but again, not the point. No, this thing is just pure 100% fun. It’s gets me from point A to point B with minimum effort and maximum fun. I love to look at this thing too. It reminds me of all the bikes I saw growing up that the “big kids” rode.

So, now I leave the car at home and ride to the store, the mall, the office, etc. It feels good to be out in the fall air. It’s even more fun to come home and grab a few stills of my new best friend. Classic lines will always be just that… classic. Here’s a few more shots to show you what I mean:

 

 

 

 

See? I know that object worship may not be the best thing to do, especially this time of year, but it still seems okay to love something that saves a few hydrocarbons. Now, if only Schwinn could split off from that multinational corporation and move back to Chicago, all would be truly right with the world.

As the words my grandfather told me still rattle in my head as a kind of “go with the flow” mantra, I now roll quietly around my neighborhood observing things and places that I’d never had the pleasure of seeing pass by that slowly or that close before. I’m sure that they too will soon be subjects for me to photograph, just as the bike that brought me to them had once been. Finding a way to blend the things that feed my soul seems much more rewarding to me now than keeping my peas and potatoes separate. If you catch my drift.

Found Objects

My four day tour of the central coast of California ended only yesterday and yet I feel a world away from it as I re-nest back here in Los Angeles. It was almost otherworldly how things just seemed to fall into place. I’d follow some vague instinctual compass toward a destination, then events would simply unfold as if I’d planned it that way from the beginning.

Now granted, driving aimlessly around an area such as San Luis Obispo won’t have you ending up anywhere too short of stunning but there is always a risk when flying blind.

Camping worked out better than I thought as well, though the only campground that could get into was surrounded by a National Guard base. Despite that geographic anomaly, it was quite a pleasant site that worked out well for my needs (i.e., fire pit, level ground, no one right next to me). I’m reserving a space at Montana de Oro state beach for next year, it’s quite a lovely spot.

As for the photographic side of my journey, I’ve included a few shots from my Canon 40D that I quickly ran through Lightroom to adjust some levels and though I hate to do it, I did crop a couple of shots.

It was a very inspiring landscape to take in viscerally but I often found myself struggling to connect photographically. It was in my calmer moments, the times I made time to sit and study my surrounding, that I found the most ease capturing what I felt and finding it in the lens.

I can see now why so many photographers I’ve respected revisit certain subjects over and over again. It’s not that they are out of ideas, it’s that they’ve had new thoughts and experiences since last seeing something a first, second or third time. They want to revisit something they have history with so as to paint it with a brush of new perspective. That kind of study can sometimes take years. This could serve me as a great exercise in patience.

Most of the places I went, I could find myself revisiting time and time again. It was four days and three rolls of quiet reflection and reflected light readings. I’ve now started my thirty-fifth year on this planet. I have no idea of where it will take me but I intend to use as much of it as I can to study things a bit closer.

Open Road

Tomorrow I’m heading out of town for my birthday. It’ll just be me, some camping gear, maybe my bike and a couple of cameras. This will be something of a first for me. Usually I spend my birthday with friends and whatnot, but this year is all about clearing out the cobwebs (creative and otherwise) so, I’ll be heading north with no set plans or destination.

Seems like a really chancy idea now that I write it down. The fact is though, most of the places that I’ve planned to be recently haven’t been that much fun, how bad could the ones I haven’t planned be?

I might cheat a bit and use the old iPhone to get some direction from time to time. Camping might be the biggest crux of the trip. I’m hoping the Jones family decides they’d rather play ski ball at the pier than commune with nature this weekend. You never know.

That’s kind of the point, right?