Away, but just for a bit…

I’m down in Florida visiting my parents and helping celebrate my father’s 70th birthday.

70.

Where does the time go?

For that matter, the daughter turned 17.

Where did that time go as well?

But it’s good that I’m here and not just because I get to see the ‘rents, but because some of the tech support I provide to their burgeoning consumer electronics needs to be hands-on and cannot be done via the telephone or remote desktop like applications. For instance:

Replaced the 512MB of RAM in the desktop PC I built for my father five years ago with 2GB of Corsair memory. I then installed an additional hard drive of 500GB (Western Digital – my preferred hard drive company) to supplement the 120GB already there. Pictures really do begin to take up space, don’t they.

My mother complained that her laptop is rather pokey and she wasn’t kidding. Painfully slow is the only description for her middle-of-the-road HP dv6000. Certainly the AMD Sempron 1.8GHz chip is part of the problem, but the real culprit was the pitiful 512MB of DDR2 PC2-5300 667MHz SODIMM memory. Between the Operating System, the anti-virus suite and the usual things running in the background (and I turned off everything that absolutely doesn’t need to be running) there was only about 96MB of RAM left to run the web browser or Windows Media Player or her e-mail application, etc. Like I already said: pitiful.

So I went out today and purchased 2GB of very, very lovely Corsair laptop memory and installed such without fuss. The improvement in responsiveness on her laptop is amazing. It actually feels like a useful device and not like the lumbering device it was just a few short hours ago.

I know…not very photography-oriented, but it is what’s been happening and it is what I’m reporting and you, my humble readers, should be happy!

Really….I’m trying my best. No. Really.

Having been on something akin to a sabbatical for many, many weeks, I have been, of late, attempting to get back into the full swing of life that is related to photography.

This means not only taking pictures, which I have done a bit of, but catching up on sites such as WordPress and Flickr. It also entails the knowledge that I have loads of pictures sitting upon my hard drive, anxiously awaiting my deft touch at processing.

Ahem.

Besides feeling the simple urge to get away from photography a bit, I have also delved into other matters, which have been keeping me both busy and occupied. Part of the current problem of catching up with photography-stuff is that I’m not letting go of the new things to which I have been engaged. Thus time becomes even more fleeting and is a rather large impediment to any sense of accomplishing tasks both necessary and desired each day.

But I promise, like a holy oath, that I’m working on catching up with everyone’s WordPress and Flickr site as well as moving forward to working on my own photographs and photography blogs. Thus far I’ve found it easier to play catch up with everyone else’s work than on my own. I’m still feeling something of a sensation to push away from the computer whenever I contemplate opening up my folders and going through my own work.

I cannot tell if this is just me reacting to a perceived lack of accomplishment in my photography or if it is something more sinister. No. That isn’t right. There isn’t anything more sinister afoot. You know…..upon reflection (and I’ve spent a fair amount of time reflecting on my photography while not actually doing any photography) I might be willing to concede that there is something of a crisis in faith going on here, which is really quite pathetic.

A number of folks I follow around WordPress and Flickr create fantastic images. Images I very much enjoy and hope that perhaps one day I’ll be able to create on my own. But the impediment to this creativity is myself. As I’ve lamented previously, I’m not a particularly creative person. So, if I know this fact about myself in advance, why should I feel anxious that I’m not creating pictures that are as interesting, etc. as those done by others, who are clearly gifted with creativity?

It would be like me envying Michael Jordan his basketball skills or Thierry Henry his football skills when I’m completely rubbish at sport because I’m hopelessly uncoordinated. And I don’t envy them their skills. But maybe that is because I haven’t ever had an interest in being a sports star, where I have thought it would be nice to be a player in the world of photography. Not a big player, but a player.

But you know something (yes, I imagine you must know something)…..now that I type this thought here, into WordPress, I realize how completely stupid it sounds. Not that my assessment is stupid, as it’s likely correctly. No, what’s stupid is that I feel this way at all.

Maybe I have to look at creativity from the context of who I am. Am I being creative for my own purposes instead of judging such against those whose work I admire and think of as being creative. I guess it is, in part, that we all aspire to believe or feel that we are really good/great at something and photography is one of those things for me. But I can live without being good or great at it. As long as I can derive pleasure from the act of photography then I should be happy enough and this is where I should be focusing my energies.

There….all better.