Toying with images

 

So I’m a writer by nature, right?

Let the jury know that I’m also a repressed photographer.

I spent more than 20 years in journalism, on various parts of copy desks and design desks. I edited a lot of pictures for content and style, color and fit. I wrote a lot of headlines (and can still count a headline in the old-school way) and a few stories. Laid out thousands of pages. Won a prize along the way.

But before much of that, I learned how to shoot. I learned a little about processing film and framing shots. Learned to look for odd angles and different colors. Photography fed my need to find out what was at the end of a dirt road, over the next hill, beyond the curve. I love to look back on a road we’ve traveled and see the ribbon of asphalt. It hurts not to know, not to see. If I don’t take a picture of it, I file it away  for a future story or I wonder what became of the people who used to be here.

Lately, I’ve been trying to take pictures of places that, to me, are home. Dirt roads. Gritty houses. Fields of wheat and corn.  Chevy trucks and shiny Mustangs. I’m not the best, but going off the grid is what my friend Raven says I do well and often.

It scares my family when I go off the grid.

It delights me to no end.