February was a great month. As is my usual habit, I spent my birthday month engaging in as much travel -- and its attendant dissipations -- as I can fit into a scant 28 days, 29 if I'm calendrically lucky. A predictably and delightfully rainy trip to northern California capped it off, and of course I'm left to reflect on the fact that my recent trips have all involved a good deal of rain. This, I'm convinced, is a good thing. It makes for better photographs.
But traveling also demands, of me at least, a healthy dose of delayed gratification. Here's what I mean: I rarely travel with my laptop computer, a generously proportioned 15-inch Macbook Pro. Much as I would otherwise like to, I don't upload any of my pictures until well after the event, and this can be any number of days away. Oh sure, I always do some on my iPhone too, and those I can see and mess with right away. That, too, is a good thing, but the ones I take with my camera -- more contemplative, perhaps -- benefit from a cooling-off period.
There are a couple of reasons for this, the first of which has troubled me since I began shooting with a digital camera. As much as anyone, I love the excitement, the joy, of seeing a beautiful image unfold in the viewfinder and then tripping the shutter. A quick glance at the LCD screen might even reinforce that feeling. But the excitement felt at the moment of exposure is often not the same as that which happens when the image is opened up and sprawled, naked and cold, on the computer screen. One is a Eureka! moment, the other is a "what do I do now?" one. They are inherently disconnected. Better to give them the advantage of time and avoid being unnecessarily disappointed. I'm sure it's a holdover from my film days, which involved the lengthy process of gathering up the exposed rolls and spending a few days developing the negatives before I could even get to the task of printing them. The inherent delay, the forced separation, was integral to the process. Consciously or not, I took advantage of it.
But the other reason, which I've mentioned in passing a couple times before, has to do with re-discovering an old image, as if to see it for the first time all over again. If I go back over images I took weeks or even months before, those initial responses and expectations are long gone. I get to interpret an image I had previously overlooked and will feel excited about it again, but for entirely different reasons having little or nothing to do with the original intent. I find that supremely satisfying, but then, I often feel the same way about Portland coffee or a good IPA. Or rain.
So maybe it's just me.
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