Soaking Up Some Winter Sun
and feeling uncomfortable about it
This morning I drank my coffee while soaking up some sun in the woods out back of our studio. It’s February in Michigan, so to say that’s not normal is an understatement. It should be sleeting or snowing or at the very least just typical shit winter weather, not a high of sixty. The midwesterner in me feels uncomfortable with sunshine multiple days in a row in winter, it’s ominous. Like when you see hundreds of birds swarming around together and wonder if they know something you don’t. But I am also a human with simple human needs and getting a dose of vitamin D from the actual sun during winter, well, it feels good. How can it not? It’s hard to know what to do with these big conflicting feelings around global warming. Today though, I give thanks for the sun.
A few Fridays ago, in the hours before a big blizzard ripped through town, I went downtown to mess around with the double exposure setting on my camera. I love double exposures but usually only take them on my Holga film camera where I have to guess how I think the photo will end up, how the two images will layer on top of one another. I have always liked the challenge of shooting on film, it’s its own creative process. Not knowing how a picture will ultimately turn out, surrendering the outcome to the process, has made me a better photographer overall.
When I began to experiment I did not expect how much I would love shooting double exposures on my digital camera. What fun it would be. To be able to layer the images in real time, to see what works as a compelling picture and what doesn’t, I felt giddy. It reminded me of when I got my first digital camera in 2004, a $400 3.2 megapixel point and shoot from Costco, a camera you could probably buy for $20 today, if that. Going from being a child of the darkroom to having instant feedback right in my hands, it catapulted my photography forward, allowing me to teach myself through what I was drawn to. I would walk around Minneapolis and Saint Paul for hours taking pictures of buildings and bridges and skyways, applying all the composition rules I had learned in high school photography classes and seeing how it worked in real time. It felt like a gift, and it was.
With the wind blowing and temperature dropping, my gloveless hands freezing but I didn’t care, I walked around downtown shooting double exposures of what I think of as My Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor of the eighties and nineties when rent was cheap and coffee shop culture just beginning. The places that still exist that I would frequent as a kid, places I hope still exist when my son is my age. It’s hard to know these days with the corporate takeover of nearly everything, rent prices absurd, blandness seeping in at the edges of every downtown that was once cool. It’s easy to feel jaded and wish it could all go back to how it once was. But there are no time machines and I don’t want to live in 1997 on repeat.
I have found lately that the deeper I let myself go into my hobbies, where I am more focused on the creative process than the outcome, the better I feel about myself and life in general. The other day I made a rather bland boring salad of butternut squash and chickpeas — too much starch, not enough texture or pizazz, the kind of squash recipe that makes you never want to make squash again — but I had a great time doing it, listening to music, being alone in the kitchen, taking my time. I felt the same way shooting photographs downtown. Rather than lamenting what once was and being annoyed that a Dunkin is taking up prime real estate in what was once a townie diner, I was able to, “have fun and practice”, as is the slogan of my son’s favorite kid art YouTube channel and honestly, words to live by. And a few hours later when the blizzard hit, I felt grateful that it still snows in winter. Even if it’ll be sixty degrees in a couple weeks.
