Lonesome Sundown
This week's newsletter title comes from this song, presented here as a cover since one of the original performers was cancelled!
The grind continues. Busy season will last another month or so. The shoots this week were great, but involved a lot of driving. At this point all the podcasts have been listened to, I'm sick of all my go-to "STAY AWAKE!" songs on Spotify, and I never want to eat gas station food ever again. Then there's the lonliness. It's a topic that some more talented and eloquent photographers have written about. The loneliness of a professional photographer, especially a wedding photographer. Sam Hurd has written about it, and asked another photographer, Ryan Brenizer, inventor of the "Brenizer Method" to write about it on his blog. I recommend reading it if you are in this or a similar industry. Some professional photographers are solitary people by nature and are perfectly happy shooting products or real estate. Most wedding and portrait photographers are more social and less solitary. Constantly being in proximity to people and excitement without being able to fully engage is hard. I'd love to attend a wedding as a guest and just have fun and be a part of the love and camaraderie. I've been invited to three weddings this year and I had to miss all of them because I was photographing other weddings. To all my friends - get married in the winter and invite me, PLEASE.
Even though as a photographer I spend many hours surrounded by people, and most of that time A LOT of people having a ton of fun, I'm not spending much of that time directly interacting with people. I'll spent anywhere from 20 minutes to 4 hours driving to the location, creep around the venue for a while to get the vibe, then I find the client and have a brief, very sincere chat with them about how they're holding up, what I can do to help, and reassure them that everything will be okay and that I'm there to help. Then I recede into the background and spend most of the day chasing after people, capturing candid moments, only occasionally interjecting to give some direction during portraits. At weddings the night is always punctuated by shooting a hundred or so close friends and family dancing, laughing, and having a night they will always remember. To get good shots I will dip my toes into the "fun and familiarity bubble" a little bit but then I need to step back and recompose myself to keep working. Then I drive home and spend the next week editing. I love it, I wouldn't want to trade it for any other career but it takes a toll after a while. Of course, my busy season eventually ends and then I can reset a bit, try to seek out fun and adventure and friends, or as much of that as I can find in the dead of winter.
Of course I need to mention that all of this would be much worse if it weren't for my wonderful wife and kids. I always get to come home to those wacky characters every day. It would be a lot more lonely if it wasn't for them.
Most of these extra-emo feelings come from the fact that this weeks shoots included another trip to The White Mountains (70 miles away) and Acadia National Park (200 miles away). That's a ton of driving. The week ended with a much closer shoot, at Kettle Cove in Cape Elizabeth. It had been rainy all day but cleared up right before the shoot started, around sunset. The shoot was fantastic, and on the drive home I was treated to some EPIC views of foggy Cape Elizabeth as the sun was going down. I'm pretty ignorant to the science of weather stuff but whatever was happening looked magical. The fog was pooling in the fields and along the river. All the pictures above were taken that night.
I'll wrap up this entry with some shots from the week. I have just as many shoots this week but they are all mercifully close by.
Cathedral Ledge, White Mountains, New Hampshire
Asticou Inn, Northeast Harbor, Maine
Wishing Pond Events, Dayton, Maine
Kettle Cove, Cape Elizabeth, Maine