Friday, July 1, 2016

Provisional Adult Identity Moratorium





Perhaps 'provisional adulthood identity moratorium' is a more appropriate term for my quarter life crisis, which stems from the realisation that being a pro-photographer for the rest of my life terrifies me in the sense that I'm kinda over it...  I'm so very fkn blessed and lucky to have made it this far with a camera but the unavoidably potent combination of an unending desire for personal growth and my growing disdain for the medium began to make my psyche undesirably turbulent which led me down a treacherous road of uncertainty, denial and eventually soul-searching. (When I said disdain It's that I'm sick of treating my photographic passion as a means to make money) What I found on my search was my overriding love for the simple act of taking pictures and the reward from getting people stoked when I can simply give them a photo- people aren't like clients, they care about that exact stoke, whereas clients care about a lot of stuff that matters to making money and fulfilling their ethos, stuff that when I'm wanting to just float around and do my thing inevitably begins to take a deathly-toll on my passion.  Perhaps the only reason I became a 'pro’ photographer was because I was good enough to get paid for a niche..

I have found a path, there are sometimes many paths, and I think this moratorium isn't temporary nor is it something I'll ever grow out of so I should get used to accepting this forcible change because trying to deny it is doom, besides, how does one deny something that has brewed up from the subconscious.  Now that I think about it my life has been a constant juggle of hobbies, I think that's probably why I enjoyed working at Goodtime so much, it's a toy shop for active teens and adults, anything powered by nature, be it gravity, wind or muscle… that's a lot of shit to dabble in and it was this endless dabbling that led me to waves, then to skate and then to photo, not that Gail sold cameras but perhaps I saw cameras as a way to dabble in even more things, as a fly on the wall, in the instant, without having to spend time practicing what it was that i wanted to take photos of… however I fear being a professional fly on the wall quite obviously means that no one hears you, nor do they want to, nor does anyone remunerate perhaps what that fly feels is an adequate reward for the sedentary future that goes along with just sitting there on the wall, waiting for something to come into the room. But unfortunately for me that's how I like to take pictures: of stuff that is ignorant to me, be it a cat, fridge or a mountain however those things don't pay very well...  hmm.

Writing rants on my phone is so very very shite but I don't wanna stop just yet, these waves of introspection stand as the only chance for me to grasp at the underlying notions as to why I do peculiar things like try to move away from my dream job.  This started as a long winded instagram caption but it is now in the stage of a mid-range blog rant.

I see a pattern in the things I've done in my life, not what or why but how long.  As I get older it appears that I do one hobby for slightly longer than that one hobby I did before it, each adding to my ability to do a new hobby and I guess in the sense of my current job I never would've made it had I not been the subject of what i was to eventually shoot, before I was shooting it...  I don't think I'll ever make an occupational jump from a to b without them being related in someway, perhaps alphabetically, and to be honest it seems wasteful to not use one’s experience to better one's chance at enjoying the new experience, but I'm stoked by the thought of the jump.  As I said in a previous post happiness exists in memories but in new experiences exists excitement and that's the good shit.. Plus then there's the age old adage of the journey and not the destination etc.

I'm taking a big risk maybe, probably less of a risk than trying to become a photographer in the first place but I'm excited by different things now, I want to learn, it's taken a long time and it's been many years since I was in any sort of learning institution but nowadays I crave deeper understanding and knowledge than what can be learnt from a product manual or brief stints on Wikipedia and even briefer in books or journals.  I don't know if studying is the right thing for me just know, I feel I have the desire and hopefully the ability to develop an income that can provide me security and eventually enough spare time to study properly, maths maybe..  which is retrospectively crazy talk but I guess that's the glory of free writing exercises such as these and sometimes I wonder why I do this on a public page but this blog has morphed along with my perspective over it's many years and I figure google ain't gonna loose their servers whereas I lose my devices almost daily, books are even harder for me to retain..  But most of all I'm excited and chuffed by the way in which my underlying motives and emotions over the last 6 years of my life are imprinted in the nonsense that plagues these pages… 

at least if it so happens that in 5 years time I'm in some dead end job and I can't remember why I quite arguably the best occupation in the world, I'll be able to come to this post and see how farcical it all may have seemed………..







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Sun down in the Mediterranean, the best part of the three ferries we took while navigating from France to Croatia.







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sunrise over my hometown, Brisbane.  We're so blessed to have such a view, thankyou Mt. Cootha.







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Sun beams in the Mojave, California..  I've traversed the region enough times to comfortably rate it as one of the most picturesque zones of planet earth.






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the sun god casting a love beam on Billy Bones, Romania - Carpathian Mountains.





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Mary Lou revelling in one of the best displays of mumma nature i've seen, the sun rose directly through the top of Mt Rinjani, I wish i'd been there 2 weeks later, watching the same vista unfold when the Volcano was erupting....






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The dark side of the sun: Blue.




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