Scraps, Part One
Sparring with time, trying to focus
Today I woke up at 0430. No alarm. Just suddenly felt like there’s shit to do. There’s always shit to do. Yesterday I got up at 0500. The day before that, 0530. I usually get up anywhere from 0600-0700, and even then, I’m never this energetic. So this trend (?) is an abberation.
I think the biggest contributing factor is nature. With east-facing windows in the PNW summer, that Sun starts smacking your face before you can get to the good part of your dream. Our neighbors in the trees, the birds, are the first ones up, chirping like a motherfucker at the ass crack of dawn. In my younger days, that sound meant that it was time to go to sleep. Now, in the age of every subsequent year being the Hottest Year Ever, I’ve renegotiated my relationship to the Sun.
So, my timing is off right now. Aiming for a consistency and falling short used to be a crippling feeling—one that could easily spiral into a dark place. The importance of keeping in time is magnified in music and photography. My rap cadence lies mostly in a 4/4 “pocket” and requires that my vocals dance with the music, which itself is encoded with a repetitive sound intervals. The quality of the photos we take relies on having the right shutter speed for the right aperture and lighting, universally measured in fractions of a second. In cooking, comedy, filmmaking, sports—these micro time frames matter.
I was fixated on timing, always sparring with it. Always keeping my rap cadence in the pocket. Offbeat? Do a vocal re-take. Check the light meter. Underexposed? Raise the shutter speed. An undercooked dish can result in a fatal case; an overcooked dish just sucks. Timing is everything, they say, and I believed it so much it started to hurt. These days, I’m choosing another angle. One similar to OG Bobby Ross’ mantra about happy accidents.
With that meditation, I now leave you with the first of a series of photographs that were mistimed mistakes, missed opportunities. Initial sources of frustration because, you know, film is expensive. Light leaks, unintended double exposures, overexposures, underexposures. These photos have been cut from consideration for Brownouts, the book. But they still have an interesting quality to me, or even a story I’ll write in the future about what the photo evokes.
