Spring Hormones
Can't quite remember the last time my hormones sprang into life; is there any quick way to check they are still there? Which of course, assumes that they ever were, but how could one tell? Is a love for photography a hormone-inspired phenomenon? It might be!
I also wonder whether a love for photography actually finds itself able to reside within the same skull that has apparently lost its drive for
making photographs. I've been thinking recently of just taking the battery out of the one camera that currently houses such a thing because I don't want it to rot there, just as happens a couple of times in every life with torches.
The current problem is, really, that at the end of working on some pix the moment comes when one asks - at least, I do - so what happened, did the Earth really move? Most of the time it appears not to have budged one iota. There has to be a certain perversity in continuing along such barren routes, no?
(This is all about personal considerations, by the way, not about any pictures folks have posted here.)
Is the pleasure one of camera ownership, of one-upmanship, of constantly upgrading and spending more and more to get somewhere up at the top of the totem pole; is it of a sense of adventure even, or is it something born of habit and the fact that the money has been spent, so may as well use the purchase simply to justify it?
I know without doubt that the removal of the professional bit has turned the whole thing upside down for me; rather than any supposed freedom to "shoot for myself", there is suddenly no other self for whom
to shoot, since pretty much all I did professionally in the final half of the career was largely self-motivated and packaged to anyone willing to finance the gig. And there the rub: finance is of the essence if I want to do the things I want to do. Big finance I do not have, and would not spend on those trippy things if I had it. It would be hollow. It needs the client belief in one's ability to deliver.
I suppose I would never have been a happy amateur, never seeing photography from that perspective even as a schooldboy: it was always going, sooner or later, to be the job, the entire life. I wonder if professional journalists get the same feeling at the ending of their working lives and begin to devote their remaining time to the book they will never publish? Or the pub?
Unfortunately, I don't know any retired journos so can't ask 'em.
;-)
