A Man of a Certain Vintage

It's always good to start at the beginning. As 2011 dawned, I couldn't seem to shake the feeling that something was missing in my life.  And no, it wasn't God, the love of a good woman or a superlative bordeaux, although my long-term prospects would probably greatly benefit from a generous infusion of all three.  It was something that I couldn't quite put my finger on and it was niggling away at me.  I needed to scratch, but couldn't identify the itch. And after throwing myself into a truly intense period of both photography and filmmaking for the past year and a half, I didn't suspect for a moment that what might be missing from my life would be a creative outlet of all things.  I realized moments after penning a long note to a dear friend living and working in London, that that something was writing.  I missed writing.  Specifically, writing for myself.

I've been blogging for a while now, starting with Boston or Bust, on January 14, 2005. The Blog was an online journal of my attempts to qualify as a middle-aged fat man for the Boston Marathon.  B or B was mostly a running Blog, the pages occasionally littered with my musings about life.  After I successfully qualified for Boston and ran it twice, the express purpose for the Blog seemed, well, lost.  And after 654 posts, I seemed to be talking a lot more about a newfound passion, photography, than I did about marathoning.  So, I decided to change gears, and I switched from Boston or Bust, to a new Blog, Fifty in Photos.  The fifty having significance in the title because I was fast approaching the half century mark.

Like its predecessor, Fifty in Photos was launched at the start of 2010.  I suspect I have a weakness for resolutions, goal setting and clean slates, all of which seem pertinent and fresh early in a new year.  The new Blog was going to focus (pun intended) on photography and was meant to chronicle my attempt at a 365 photography project in the year I turned -- you guessed it -- 50.  A picture a day for an entire year. The Blog was meant to not only post a new image every day, but to talk about it. The attempt failed. In retrospect, it was a far larger undertaking in terms of time than I had expected, but the biggest wrench in the works was a complete failure of my computer system several months into 2010.  In the midst of shooting a film, an extended trip, and other work (never mind life), it was the final straw.  And it took me six weeks to get my new system up and running.

So Fifty in Photos died an ignominious death after a mere 128 posts (granted, the average Blog dies an ignoble death after six posts, but I digress).  It's a truism that no good craftsman ever blames his failures on his tools, but then again, no one ever won a Grand Prix race after the wheels fell off their car.  Regardless, despite the fact that I fell behind in my blogging, I actually DID take at least one photograph a day from January 1 until late September.  And this was after I had spent much of August and September on a photo safari in Africa where I took some twenty thousand images.  And on the trip I suffered another series of technical malfunctions, the most significant being when my lap top died when the logic board fried itself, and I drowned three lenses and I left my iPhone 4 somewhere in a canola field in South Africa.  Africa was glorious and troubled.  It was the best of times and the worst of times.

And how did my 365 project end?  One rainy day in late September, while stopping over in Paris on my way back from Africa, just as I was about to leave the house, I paused when automatically reaching for my camera, and I thought about it, and I just decided, "to Hell with it". And my 365 project ended just like that.  I had one or two twinges, but no real regrets.  It's not like I was a twenty-something slacker drifting through 2010 with no real purpose. 

In 2010 I was at enrolled in the Commercial Photography Certificate Program at Langara College.  I did more than a dozen photography workshops and seminars during the course of the year.  I took over a hundred thousand frames. I won the Rock 101 Olympic Photography Contest.  One of my photographs was picked for a book on East Vancouver.  One of my iPhone images won a prize from an online Adorama photography contest.  I shot The Tattoo Project as both a documentary film and as a photography project, and we had a rather spectacular Gallery Exhibit and Calendar.  I ran two marathons. And I traveled to Mexico, Cuba, Panama, the Queen Charlotte Islands, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, England, France, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.  And I met a girl.  A rather riveting woman, actually.

What do I want to write about now?  I'm not sure.  I just know that I want to write and I suspect that on a much deeper level, I need to write.  Behold, the birth of, "A Man of a Certain Vintage".

What is on the horizon for a man of a certain vintage?  Hopefully in 2011 I'll end the year having completed the certificate program in photography at Langara College.  With fingers crossed, I hope and trust that, The Tattoo Project will air as a documentary film.  In May I hope to run my eleventh straight Vancouver Marathon and the thirtieth marathon in my little running career.  The rest?  Who knows what the future holds...