Just thoughts.

I wonder sometimes if wanderlust is a disease of which I will never be cured …

Perspective, thank you.

I spent the past two days with octogenerians, reporting for my NCOA project, first in New York City, then in Allentown, Pa. Nothing like spending your days with a group of 80-year-olds to give one a little bit of perspective …

Eleanor, 83

Cheers to old views.

My friend Andrew in Morocco, April 2007.

In addition to marveling in my acquisition of a few new tools, I’ve just stumbled upon the beauty of rediscovering old views.

Case in point: A project I’m working on involves dragging out old hard drives and sifting through photographs I took three years ago while studying abroad in Europe.

It was 2007 and I’d never picked up an SLR camera; didn’t even know how to spell the word aperture and had only the vaguest idea that a slow shutter speed might make things blurry. But armed with my tiny point and shoot camera I ran around that continent with the widest eyes in the world, just absolutely fascinated by what I could capture, by how I could manipulate the camera.

I could never go back to just shooting with that tiny camera. But in sifting through these photos I find this old way of seeing things — this innocence — something I can take and incorporate into the work I’m doing now.

Cheers to new-old views … (or would that be old-new views?)

Julie.

An ode to new tools.

View from a place where I felt creative.

This is a horrible statement for a photographer to make — but you know when everything around you starts looking the same? You’ve lived somewhere for a while now, been looking through the same one or two trusty lenses, riding the same escalator in and out of the metro, throwing that same red scarf around your shoulders, pulling on the same black jacket, clicking the shutter in all the usual places? Inspiration starts to wear thin.

Which is why I’m so excited about new projects and new tools. Like a musician playing the same instrument over and over again, or a poet with a static syntactic reportoire, I can’t help but feel that I’ve outgrown my camera, my lenses, my editing tools. I need something new — rather several somethings new — to shake things up and shock myself into creative chaos, expand my toolbox, let’s say.

En fin, here’s to creativity …

Julie.