OK… After binge watching YouTube videos for a few weeks now, it’s time for me to stop watching and get to work! True confessions – I am a natural born minimalist. Most likely my largest minimal project was when I sold my big home in the midwest, donated most all of my belonging – including 4 bedrooms full of furniture and stuff, and moved to California. With some of the home sell funds, I purchased my first full frame camera, the Canon 6D. It felt cleansing! Finally after years of dreaming, I live near the water. The transition involved sacrificing home ownership in exchange for renting a 600 square foot back cottage. It’s not perfect …but definitely minimal. I love the change!
Even though it’s easy to accumulate gear with photography, I try to keep my gear stuff to a minimum. If I want to upgrade my camera or a lens, I sell a previous one. For the past 4 years, I’ve been processing all my photos on my 13” MacBook Pro. It has worked up to now but not easy especially if I want to print. So this week, after processing tiny photos and squinting to view pixels for a while, I upped my game and purchased a 27 “ monitor. I almost felt guilty… not for spending the money, but for purchased something that is large. Honestly it’s time… but that brings me back to minimalism. With today’s purchase, I plan to see how I can reorganize, remove items, and streamline my space again – reset my ways.
Part of that reset is getting back to blogging and really sharing my content. What I’ve been doing instead is taking thousands and thousands of photos but they are becoming stored on my new huge drive and not being shared or printed. That’s not in-line with minimalism and needs to stop. But, I needed to take a lot of photos to learn from mistakes, to gain editing skills and learn sharing in a usable format. I’ve spent a good year focusing on the technical side. Now it’s time to get back to my original goal – to share and to print photos in a minimal painterly look that I love – just like how I feel when I walk seaside or down a quiet nature path.
I changed my routine a bit this morning. I woke up late ( for me 5:30 AM :-). I took a calm relaxing walk on the beach with no expectations. A soft sunny haze was was starting to make it appearance pre-dawn. Over on the mountain in the east, the sea mist was doing its magic – muting the details of the scene. The tide was high and coming in rapidly so I couldn’t walk too far. But nonetheless, I trudged down this path to an area that I love that I have not visited for a while. I finally got a point where I plopped down my tripod and said, “Okay Sally, it’s time to get a bit serious.” I took a few long exposures. I have yet to download anything but I plan to share at least one with you.
So what are my goals for the future?
- Be true to my photos.
- Clean out my space. I work better this way.
- Really start working on my printing.… And that includes really working on my post processing.
- Share something on this blog at least monthly 🙂
No pressure … I’m just going to start with today.