Morning sunlight streams through lifting fog on November 1st, 2022. Despite the rural feel, this photo was taken on the side of a six-lane county highway in Illinois’ second most populous county.
As soon as Mike Johnston proposed the Leica Year at his blog, The Online Photographer, I was smitten. Though I have yet to summon the fortitude to commit to the project, it routinely occupies bandwidth in the part of my consciousness that I can devote to thoughts about my photography. Maybe one of these years…
While I may not have committed to the project as described, one tenet has stuck with me and I’ve incorporated it into my lifestyle. “Carry the camera with you all day, every day.” While the exact camera may vary, it’s a rare occurrence indeed when I walk out my door without some manner of camera beyond the embedded camera in my smartphone.
There are days when I wonder why I bother. I’ll go days, weeks and occasionally even months without shooting a single frame from this camera carrying dedication. (If I ever actually try to commit to Mike’s exercise, I’d need to work on that. Shooting as sparingly as I sometimes do falls far short of the minimum goal of 2 films per week.) Sometimes, though, the universe smiles at the dedicated photographer and offers up a devotional reward. Such was the case this morning.
These trees are subjects that I pass by on my way to work. I noticed them essentially as soon as I started commuting from our new house last year. I have waited and waited for the perfect conditions to photograph them. My habit of always carrying a camera with me paid dividends this morning when I saw the residual fog burning off in the morning’s early light. While I was wishing that I had my main Nikon kit, I made do with the Fuji X-Pro 1 and XF 35mm f2 that tends to be my photographic companion more often than not on the commute to work.
Beyond the rewards for my camera commitment, these shots reminded me that I really need to practice vigilance when it comes to my landscape photography. I’ll admit that I still have trouble reconciling the fact that Colorado is no longer outside to greet me every morning. When a scene like this can be found in the most unlikely of locations (despite the rural feel, these shots are on the side of a very busy six-lane secondary highway in Illinois’ second most populous county), it’s a reminder that beauty is indeed everywhere for those willing to look.
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I commented on another site this week already that said 10 rolls of film a month should be what we all aim for, to get good. Holy wow, I can’t imagine where I’d find the time!
I wonder if part of the value of the exercise is to just shoot and shoot and shoot with the idea that there will be an enormous load of mundane or bad shots but there would still be the opportunity to learn to see light or compositions in unknown places. Maybe the water cooler at work isn’t something one would normally consider photographing but perhaps from a particular angle with nice light, it could be. Wearing a camera everywhere one goes for a year with a mandate to shoot a lot of film while carrying it could be a great opportunity. I think that’s part of what is appealing about this for me. Currently, I know what kinds of pictures I like to make and I make them. But I wonder what I am missing because I’m not looking.
The other part is just the satisfaction of completing an exercise like this. Kind of like runners completing a marathon. Being able to say that I was committed enough to photography to do a full year with one camera, one lens and one type of film feels like something worth pursuing…if I can ever get past the fact that I couldn’t use any of my other cameras or lenses in that year!