It Never Ends

L

et’s be clear. Yesterday sucked. Again.

What do I care about most since I consider it to be the foundation of everything else?

The environment.

What did The-Less-Than-Supreme-Court do yesterday?

They shut down the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency.

What the hell are these faux judges trying to do? Some people say with all their backwards decisions they are trying to bring us back to the fifties. I’ll add to that, which fifties? The 1950s? or, the 1850s? At they rate they are going Clarence and Ginny Thomas will have to get divorced when they overturn Virginia v Loving. Oh, the irony.

With every idiotic decision they make I feel like this isn’t my country. We’d make a move to someplace else on the globe, but I really would like to die at home, in the country in which I was born. Besides, I’d rather stay and fight.

The more I learn the more I know that my country hasn’t acted in good faith. I looked into the Fugitive Slave Act. It’s not what you think. For instance, it allowed free Black people to be transported from some northern city to just over the border to a slave state and be forced into servitude.

There is so much more, but it’s Friday and I don’t want to depress myself.

T

his photograph was made in Las Vegas on assignment for Lonely Planet. I surprised my editor with some very unusual perspectives tucked in with some of the usual stuff. This was one of them. This is a form of street photography.

Street photography has become a really big deal. I think that’s because so many new photographers have no technical skills beyond wanting every picture to be very sharp and in focus. But, they can’t see or feel. That takes time in they want to great in ten easy lessons. They shoot from across the street with a long lens. They shoot from behind. They don’t talk to their subjects. And, they never take their time. They machine gun their exposures.

Seeing and feeling takes time, patience and repetition. If I’m good at it all it started very early in career when I had to come up with at least three stand alone feature pictures for my newspapers. You start learning pretty quickly. Some days the pictures appeared in front of me, other days not so much.

I eventually got pretty good at it, but that took three years. It wasn’t easy or fast.

Time matters. Patience matters. Practice matters.