I used to do this often and with very little friction during the early years of blogging. Toss up a picture on the screen. Follow the story it tells.
In 2002 I got my first digital camera--a Nikon pocket camera that took 2MB images. At last, I was liberated from the dependence on the black box of film, where a photographer had no idea what they’d captured until the slides or prints eventually came back from expensive mail-in processing.
And as it turned out, at about the same time I gained this unlimited capacity to save images of the place around me, I started writing about “place” in a blog I started in May of 2002.
Fragments from Floyd: Images in Words and Pixels
Each early morning began by looking at the shots on my Coolpix tiny memory card to see what I most wanted to write about. More often that not, the image came first, and the story grew out of it.
I never really knew what I would say about the picture of clouds or wildflowers or insects of details of the creek on my screen until my hands started moving. Often, I was pleasantly surprised where the trail led me, and how the tale unfolded.
This was when I began to grow writing muscle by the act of writing--without hope and without despair, as a mentor advised. Write every day; write from the heart; write what you know. This was my mission statement.
And so I find this snapshot, now like almost all my images over the past decade, taken with the remarkable camera I always have with me. You can also make phone calls on it, I think.
And so I’m hoping that a return to this kind of spontaneous celebration in words and pixels might be a path forward, towards a renewed writing joy and discipline and spontaneity, bring me at least some small part of the returns that I once enjoyed with a community of readers.
My hopes in this regard, I confess, are tempered by the reality of how vastly more diluted has become the attention of those who once relied on blogs for their “watering hole” conversations.
And so, once again, I do this for me. And already this tiny discourse has sent me back to find old threads I’d probably enjoy unraveling in sentences and paragraphs to come. To have written so many mornings to the images in my life is now an abundant source of satisfaction. Why not add more?
I rejoice in this decision Fred! I love to read kinds of blogs you wrote in the early years. I started reading you in 2003.