In this issue

1. My Image of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. The Power of a Pure Heart (Your Images)

4. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

5. Endpapers

My image of the week

Frontispiece

Introduction

We live in a world of images.

Everyone has a camera, be it a full-blown DSLR kit or a mobile phone.

We have gone from a world where the word reigned supreme to one where we use imagery to tell our stories.

Just look back at some old textbooks (if you have any left) where words were the primary method of passing on information. Sometimes, but not always, they were accompanied by images, but these were almost inevitably line drawings and rarely colour images.

Now it would seem that things have turned 180 degrees. Manuals and textbooks tend to be image-focused, with text bombing filling in the corners of what is taught.

In fact, in some ways, we've gone back to the days of hieroglyphics and short-form methods of saying what we want to convey. The emoji is a classic case in point. Now, rather than write "I love what I'm looking at", we use a simple graphic to say the same thing. And, because this is becoming an agreed convention, we are all happy with it.

Unless, of course, like Charlton Heston, we've just returned to the Planet Of The Apes from a journey around the Universe. Then we will be scratching our heads while we look at the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the beach.

And why is that? Why do we rely upon emojis and acronyms and abbreviations when we could be conveying the information precisely and carefully using beautifully-crafted text?

The answer is because we don't have the time to do anything else. We live in a world bombarded by visual information and stimulation. So to have any way of wading through the tsunami of incoming data, we have resorted to using all of these things.

So when was the last time you wrote or received a handwritten letter? I would venture to bet that it's been quite a while. There's something about receiving a letter in the mail. There's the knowledge that somebody took the time out of love and/ or respect for you to craft something of significance and weight.

When we are increasingly separated from each other by the complex forces in the world today, perhaps the simple act of settling down with pen and paper and creating something meaningful and considered might go a long way to make sure we retain our sense of community.

And if any of you are feeling the pull to get back to hand-written missives, check out the link at the bottom of the Fevered Mind Links section.

People with a fetish for fountain pens and inks SHOULD NOT visit it.

Your wallet will suffer.

Badly.

The Power of a Pure Heart (Your Images)

As the newsletter has been finding its own expression, I've been contemplating the value of sharing images, not my own, especially those with real communication power. Last week I wrote about the joy and power of amateur photography, of making pictures for the love of it. This week I saw a lovely image I want to share and talk about.

Perhaps, because I've been around photography a long time, almost as long as I have been around, and because I live in a world awash with imagery, I've become rather blase and picky about what images light my fire. So, mostly, I glance and move on. I imagine I don't have that to myself. I suspect I'm not alone.

However, every so often, I come across a photograph that stops me in my tracks. It is transparently authentic and honest, and it tells such a remarkable story that I stare in awe.

This week I had the singular honour and good fortune to judge a New Zealand camera club competition. Now, I usually avoid these and pretend I don't exist, hoping nobody will ask me, but this was something different, online live judging with two other photographers I deeply respect. But, of course, live judging comes with its challenges, not the least of which is being at once informative and helpful, as well as being respectful of the images themselves and, by extension, their authors.

It was great fun to sit at the front of a virtual room, give my thoughts, and then work with the other judges to agree on where the work sat relative to those around it. So what should have been a two-hour session turned into a marathon of four hours, simply because each of us wanted to honour the work itself and the passion of the photographers who had submitted.

It was highly competent work, with only a couple of images falling short for technical reasons.

I've seen a lot of work, over the years, some of it quite extraordinary. And, while I'm generalising, I love looking at newbie's submissions because often they haven't yet been shoehorned into some stylistic straitjacket. Instead, they're doing it with a pure heart unfettered by the expectations of others.

I once awarded top honours to a nine-year old's image because it was so fresh and original. Out of the mouth of babes. Needless to say, the senior members of the club were miffed, to put it mildly!

The header image for this section was one entry for this Auckland club's end-of-year competition. The moment I saw it, I fell in love with it.

Unfortunately, that doesn't often happen these days.

It's a simple image but one which tells a beautiful story. No doubt you'll have your interpretation of it; however, for me, it is a joyous story about the contrast between artificial/manmade and natural. It's the pure power of photography, to take a moment and make something iconic.

Yesterday morning I reached out to Matt and asked him if he would be OK if I shared it with you. He agreed.

Great work should be shared rather than left to rot deep within someone's hard drive. So we had a quick chat about Matt's journey with photography. He's only been doing it seriously since the beginning of this year (!), so it's a remarkable achievement. He saw the moment approaching and gathered it up in a rather wonderful image which, I feel, deserves a lot of exposure.

I hope you like it. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Is there a moral here? A lesson, perhaps?

It seems to me there are three parts to an image:

1. The subject,

2. The story, and

3. The presentation.

The subject doesn't have to be of great significance. Sometimes the most mundane things have the most to say. We don't need to climb to the top of a mountain to make a great image. There are great images all around us.

We have to be open to them appearing to us.

Photography's strength has always been storytelling. The stories can be straightforward, slices of ordinary everyday life, or they can be momentous. But there needs to be a story of one sort or another.

You might want to go through your pictures and ask yourself how many of them tell authentic stories that may be of value to others. Are they informative or merely decorative? Do they have a clear message, or do they signal that perhaps you weren't entirely sure what it was you were trying to say?

The presentation includes such things as post-production, output medium and intended audience. The great photographer Ansel Adams put it this way:

In the old days (of film photography), things pretty much ended after you pushed the button. Then, there was a limited range of development opportunities, and the output was either a transparency/slide or a print.

Today our output is limited only by our technical abilities (or willingness to outsource our work to India!) and willingness to align our output with our intention. Today we are the photo lab, and as much as some of us may hate working with our computers, the plain fact of the matter is that's a critical part of what we do. And, dare I say it, it is expected.

Adams himself talked about previsualisation, seeing the finished work in his mind's eye before pressing the shutter, knowing his process from shutter to print so intimately and thoroughly that he could see the finished work/ print before he made the exposure.

Nothing has changed.

We may have moved on to a digital world, one where our work is limited only by our imagination, willingness to get involved, and put in the time to develop our previsualisation process.

And the awareness that every picture we make, have ever made or will ever make is a self-portrait, a postcard we are writing to ourselves.

Every image tells us a story about who we are.

If we want to reflect on that.

An old friend, himself a gifted photographer, put it this way:

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Kinship: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Love Poem to Trees, the Interleaving of Life and Death, and the Eternal Flame of Being — www.themarginalian.org

I have been thinking a great deal about growth — what it means, what it asks of us, how it feels when unforced but organic.

How Bach Will Save Your Soul: German Philosopher Josef Pieper on the Hidden Source of Music’s Supreme Power — www.brainpickings.org

Some of humanity’s greatest and most fertile minds — including Oliver Sacks, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Aldous Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche — have contemplated the power of music, and yet the question of why music moves us so remains unanswered, and perhaps u

Slow-Cooker White Bean, Spinach & Sausage Stew — www.eatingwell.com

Rating: 4 stars This was an easy delicious and comfort food recipe. I used canned cannellini beans (they were on hand) and shortened cooking time.

The Geometry of Grief: A Mathematician on How Fractals Can Help Us Fathom Loss and Reorient to the Ongoingness of Life — www.themarginalian.org

“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives as she neared, but never quite reached, the triumph of having lived a century — a bittersweet triumph, for to live at all, however long or sho

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel — www.themarginalian.org

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche.

He Whakaputanga - Declaration of Independence — nzhistory.govt.nz

In 1831, 13 Ngāpuhi chiefs wrote to King William IV of the United Kingdom to seek an alliance and protection from other powers. On 28 October 1835 James Busby took this a step further at a hui (meeting) he had called at Waitangi.

Euphoria - Cathartic Emotional Release - Pleasurable State Of Mind - Meditation - Relaxing Music — www.youtube.com

This meditation music induces feelings of euphoria, deep relaxation, and an especially pleasurable state of mind. This music induces a cathartic emotional release, and guides your brain waves into the low delta wave range. We experience these brain waves naturally when we are in the deepest of sleep...

Pen Classics — penclassics.nz

Cart Fountain Pens Bottled Inks Notebooks Pen Storage Wallet warning!

End Papers

My YouTube Studio

For the last month or so, I have been creating my own YouTube Studio and buying stuff to kit it out as I move towards teaching online.

The above image gives you an idea of the front end, with the light, podcasting mike and small sound mixer.

It is nearly there. In the next week or two, I hope to acquire a small DSLR to function as a webcam instead of the Logi I am currently using.

The image below is the background, with the kauri hoe (oar) a friend gifted. The flag is He Whakaputanga, a copy of New Zealand's first flag, which flew several years before the signing of Te Tiriti O Waitangi. It connects me to my Ngāpuhi/Te Rarawa whakapapa.

You can read more about it in the links above.

Finally...

A big welcome to those of you who have jumped on board in the last week. I hope you like what you are seeing and reading.

As always, please let me know what you like, dislike and would like to see appearing more.

And, if you think someone else might like to read this, please share it freely.

Ngaa mihi nunui arohaa ki a koutou

Much love to you all.