Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Why I Haven't Quit My Day Job

Whenever I’m away from my desk, it seems that the world is determined to show me strange and beautiful things. An albino sea turtle, for one, gleaming like white gold beneath the blue water. And a brown booby, who nabbed a flying fish off a wave-crest as I watched from the kayak.

When a juvenile frigate bird tried to steal the booby’s fish away, I paddled over to offer support. The frigate fled, and then the booby enjoyed its meal, as well as (apparently) my company, eventually settling on this buoy to pose and preen.


A few days later, doubting my vision of the gilded turtle in the middle of copyediting a book about J. Alden Weir, the American Impressionist, I took the time for a quick search online (our family calls it, “consulting the oracle”). As it turns out, albino turtles, while uncommon, are not unheard of, although it’s more likely that the one I saw was leucistic. That’s one of my favorite things about the Web: what you might, in some less enlightened age, have been tempted to call hallucination can now be labeled as probable sighting.

Another of the fun things about the Web is that it brings nonstop news of success: the glad tidings of friends and acquaintances, as well as the exploits of impossibly lucky or talented humans who you will never meet.

On the other hand, if you are one of the untold millions striving to find a voice (and a paycheck), the continuous awareness of other folks’ book deals and movie options might leave you feeling like a chronic underachiever. At those moments, it can help to remember that the mere attempt to create carries its own rewards (sometimes long deferred, sometimes completely unfathomable).

Though it’s scant consolation, I try to remind myself that each rejection letter means that I now have one more reader than I did a minute ago. Not a satisfied reader, but hey, you can’t please everybody. The important thing—for my own sense of being a person among other people—is to keep plugging away. I don’t insist on becoming Meb Keflezighi every time I set out on a morning run, so why feel unhappy about not being Jim Harrison whenever I sit down at the keyboard?

The fact is that only a rare few get paid to play. The rest of us, as Gillian Welch sings, “do it anyway.”  Here are links for a handful of stories that found publication this spring, none of them in print, and none for pay . . .

• a few thoughts on aspirational flyfishing photography at Tail magazine

• tips for making the most of a trip to Mongolia at On the Fly magazine

• an update on our conservation work in Orvis News

• humor for proofreaders or mathematicians (your choice) at the Science Creative Quarterly

• and a brief meditation on zen and the art of nonrefundable airfares at We Said Go Travel.



Tuesday, December 6, 2011

The Season in Pictures

This year's client list featured many talented anglers, including Australia's Philip Clement, Maine's Fred Clough, North American rep of the Lax-A Angling Club, and London's Matt Harris. The photos below are mine, but Matt's album from the river includes some truly spectacular images.














Friday, June 1, 2007

In Olde Shanghai


On Sunday, I followed freelance photographer Gangfeng Wang on a tour of the Shanghai neighborhood where he grew up. The aging blocks of shikumen housing are slated for demolition by the end of 2007. He introduced us to several residents, and also took us inside a grand building that I’ll describe below.

The central staircase, as wide as the lane outside, winds upward to the former ballroom. Above our heads, the day’s laundry dries on bamboo poles slotted between the balusters. On the second-floor landing, the judge’s widow is frying her lunch: a platter of small headless fish, each no longer than a teaspoon.

Eleven judges once shared this dwelling, a mansion that its Concession-era owner intended to house a single family. But the Party liberated it for the judges—and now the survivors and descendants of judges, three of whom stand side by side at their stoves at this very moment, each tending a single burner.

Their collective spirit came to a halt with the advent of utility bills. Each resident has designated gas, electric, and water meters, with separate switches and taps. Although for the first 50 years, they all took turns in the lone bathtub and toilet.

The judge’s widow has lived in this place since she was 25 and that’s what she wants us to know. Last year, she and her housemates were finally rewarded with private bathrooms.

Steam rises from the widow’s wok and I follow its path upward, to a decorated plaster ceiling, once pink and gold and perhaps green, but now the tactile brown of five decades of cooking grease. One resident tried to paint it white, the widow says, but we think it looks better this way.


P.S. This entry emerged from a brief exercise with the writing group that I am now (sadly) leaving. Thanks to all of you for your stories and your friendship.