Another slow kind of day where I didn’t do much. What I did do was something I’ve been procrastinating on for a few months, and that’s processing the photos I took on my road trip from back in April. I shot a few thousand photos during the trip, and I only recently whittled that down to about 300. Before, my workflow would then consist of editing each RAW file in Capture One over many hours across many days (or weeks, in this case), and I just wasn’t feeling that anymore. I could even foresee how much this problem would intensify during the trip, as I invested in styles for Capture One that I hoped would make editing quicker, but there was something about them didn’t quite jibe with me, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

Because I was getting tired of editing, I began to finally play around with recipes for my Fujifilm cameras, and I quickly took to it. Like, almost immediately. This was exactly what my photography was missing, as I explained a bit in my post from when I went to Kerr Dam last month. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Fuji’s X RAW STUDIO app, and even though it is slightly buggy, I really like it. It’s very easy to create recipes with it and even easier to assign them to specific slots on my camera. If you put two and two together, then you can see where my head is at: I began to apply some of my favorite recipes for the X-T4 onto the photos I took during my road trip, and they have been coming out a lot better than I could have imagined. And what’s cool about the X RAW STUDIO app is that you can play around with exposure, highlights, and shadows and apply some nice edits to the photos. It doesn’t allow for cropping or straightening, which is a feature I would love it to have because then, I don’t think I would even need an app like Capture One anymore. And what’s cool, too, is that all this processing happens on the camera itself, so it’s kinda like I took those photos with those specific simulations while I was out and about. Not quite, but close.

I’m not finished processing these photos because, again, I’ve been lazy today, but the photos I have processed look pretty good, and that makes me happy and every excited to both finish and to head out on the road again. I’m super excited about that.

Yesterday I received my new camera and lens, the X-T50 and XF16-50mm kit lens, and I took both to Kerr Dam in Polson to try them out. This camera replaces my aging X-T20, a camera that will always have a special place in my heart because it was there with me when I rebooted this blog back in 2020. I loaded the Kodak Film film recipe from Fuji X Weekly into the X-T50, and I went at it.

All these photos are straight out of camera and have not been edited. Over the past few months I have been focusing my attention on trying to get the shot right in camera because I’ve become tired of editing photos, and this X-T50 does all I want and need out of a camera. I am in love, and I love how these photos turned out.

Also, I’m back, and it feels good to be back. I’m doing better. Thank you to everyone who reached out. You have no idea how much that meant to me. If I have it in me, I’ll write about my experiences from the last few months later this summer. Until then, thank you for reading and go enjoy the sunshine!

I’ve been spending the past week watching Alec Soth’s channel on YouTube, and yesterday I watched his video titled COLORS #52. In it, he looks through the book COLORS: A Book About a Magazine About the Rest of the World and quotes Oliviero Toscani, one of the co-founders of the magazine. Oliviero is being interviewed, and when asked if there are any photographers or artists capable of carrying on a project as pioneering as COLORS was in the early 90s, he answers:

Certainly, only that no one teaches them not to be frightened of being frightened. If you do something without being frightened, it’ll never be interesting or good. Everyone wants to be sure of what they’re doing. Any really interesting idea simply can’t be safe.

When I went to film school, I remember early on how courageous I was in expressing my ideas and concepts with the stories I wrote (even though I failed a lot), but at one point, I lost that. I became afraid of the writer’s room, of seeing the expressions on my classmates faces after reading the 10 page scene I wrote an hour before class started. I remember how often I would watch movies when feeling stuck, and how my pages reeked of what I last watched. I remember how painful it became to show up to class with my subpar pages, and how ashamed I felt when I felt excited that I had something to write about after I found out my uncle had died in a car crash. I remember I decided to start writing novels instead of movies because of this fear. I had wanted to run away from it, but after writing two books that will never see the light of day, I realize now that I’m still frightened.

I’m frightened of being judged and ridiculed, of failing. I’m frightened of exploring my weird ideas because they might not be “marketable” or “popular.” I picked up photography because it was something so different from writing, and at first, I really enjoyed it. But again, at one point, I became paralyzed by fear. My artistic impulse has been to keep pushing my art forward, but when I’m afraid of so many things, I don’t end up creating anything at all.

In my post Bravery from July 2020, I quoted Rebecca Toh. I had asked her how she had the confidence to carry a camera with her everywhere and photograph people. “The important thing,” she said:

is not to let your shyness get in your way. The thing about photography is that it throws you into direct contact with life, and that can be scary at times, but if you want to do the photography you want to do, there is simply no way about it except to go out bravely and shoot.

I’ve been trying to find the courage ever since, but maybe I’ve been approaching it wrong. Maybe it’s not courage I need but the confidence to be frightened. To admit to myself that these ideas might not be “marketable,” that these photos might not be “popular,” but so what? Like Oliviero says, “Any really interesting idea simply can’t be safe.”

Like Pema Chödrön writes in The Places That Scare You, “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”