Falling Light

I laid yesterday afternoon and watched the light fall into dusk. That wouldn't be all that unusual for a photographer I suppose except that I was sick, stuck lying on my couch, listening to my partner Jenn read aloud from a book about Cook's voyages in Australia, and soaked in the warm late summer sun as it slowly journeyed to and beyond the horizon through my front window, over the garden and distance west hills. What made it unusual was that it was a journey over four hours.

It was an absolutely gorgeous self-indulging journey and one I would never have made if I had not been sick. For the first time in many years, nearly a decade, since an afternoon on the northern Serengeti, I just watched light. I watched it do that most magical thing - change the world.

It reminded me how impatient we are to not indulge ourselves in such an incredible journey. How for granted we take each daily event of magic. And perhaps why there are so few great photographs, and yet so many cameras.

When I was very young in my to-be-a-photographer journey my friend Ernst Haas had a stuccatoed monologue with me one afternoon, what I wrote down from it later was - "Go for a walk one day with the light, you will come back changed."

If you look at his work - B&W or color - you can see many walks, countless walks, walks with and without people, walks in cities, in countrysides, walks at night, and in the heat of the day, but all these walks have one common companion - Light. I think he took far fewer photos than he did walks with light. Thinking back on my precious time with him I'm certain of it. And that idea has triggered a rebirth in my photography, my need to create photographs, a need for more walks; and an idea for an essay, maybe a book, at the least a way to start re-seeing the world I perambulate - A walk with Light.