The rain has been going almost nonstop now for hours. Little periods of a light drizzle, enough to allow for a routine run. Lightning providing sunlight for a split second. The streets are starting to flood. It’s all pretty magnificent. The worst of the storms blew through in about 5 minutes and paralleled to the local tornado siren. I stared out the window. The light before an oncoming storm…a black sky with sunlit houses…isn’t something to take for granted. The area is reaching a saturation point however. It’s losing its calming feeling. The news is talking about it more. The thunder just keeps rumbling far enough away for you to wonder if it’s gonna pour like hell over your head again. The river is probably rushing. Hell, the lazy DuPage River even had some semblance of a current yesterday while me and Coe kayaked a few miles down it. The rain could use some slowing down…. I know it helped me out.

Usually a shoot that I work for 1 1/2 hours or more can result in hundreds of photos. It’s really not fun going through all that just to find the one or three that you think may work. Yesterday I did promotional photos for The Young Sea … I took 9 photographs over the course of about 90 minutes. It was good to slow down, and the rate of keeper photos was higher too. Not only that, but I got to have fun making more vague and abstract looking images because they were open to it and I thought it fit well with the tone of their music. I’m sure a lot of photographers would call this abuse of the movements available to me on a 4×5 camera but, if it fits the mood and intended outcome, then ok. Now if I slow down a bit when I’m shooting digital that feels so disposable and isn’t 5$ a frame…
but a portrait shoot like this is so much different because you are not so much reacting to a scene like you often are while doing documentary work.
Since I’ve been home I’ve felt so wrapped up in trying to tie up loose ends (which I don’t think I’ve done at all) and seeing my friends that my moving date is coming closer and nothing is getting done. My room is a war zone of polaroids, New Yorker magazines, t-shirts, backpacks and burned DVD’s. Some damn mess. I can’t keep up on the world ever since I got home, let alone my friends or myself. Shit…it’ll be good if, when morning comes, there are no injuries trying to get from my bed to my door. I wish I could slow down. A week between the end of a bouncing around summer and moving to another state to start a new graduate program seemed like plenty of time…but at this rate it’s not even close.