It’s been a long while since I’ve practiced this practice, and there have been so many difficult days/weeks/months – sometimes the whole interval all runs together.

That’s ok. All I can do, when I feel that desire to make a picture, is from right where I am, begin again. 

The dials are no longer second nature as they used to be, the camera no longer an extension of my brain, my eyes, and my fingers. But neither is it brand new. The machine is familiar enough, and the rust in those seams wears away as I turn the dials to find my bearings – my settings.

I so desperately wanted – needed – to find beauty, but those blasted Brood X cicadas were everywhere. I rummaged around and found some inherited close-up filters I’d never tried, thinking maybe if I went smaller and closer I could find the angles that avoided them.

Silly me. Maybe for a shot or two, but I even so sensed their red eyes behind every leaf and felt them light on my back. So I surrendered to them and pulled some cross-processed film out of the fridge, thinking that since once every seventeen years my backyard looks like a 50’s sci-fi film, best to go with it, not fight it. Best not, when this impulse is so fresh and tender, not to fight anything, excepting my cicadaphobia.

I can see, over the progression of the roll, how the later pictures become more confident, are better exposed and more intentionally framed than the early ones. Even so, there is something of a dreamlike quality to the whole roll owing in part to the softer focus of that close-up filter and the way x-pro distorts bright light and shifts colors. This seems fitting. Making your way back to something you love, and finding it there, perhaps different because, after all you are different now, but still there awaiting you and letting you find your new rhythm in it, that feels a bit like a waking dream.

Keep your eyes wide open,
Debbie