Apologies for this long post! Last post I was still on the Lost Coast of California. Now I’m back at home, 9 months into semi-retirement- still working 30% at UVA. I am also ~ 4 1/2 months into my MFA program at Maine Media College. It’s a low residency program so I spend 3-4 weeks per year in Maine and the rest of the time doing projects here in Charlottesville. BTW, If you are interested in photography, film, book arts, printmaking and/or creative writing it is an awesome place to spend a week and they offer dozens of workshops every spring, summer and fall.

After admiring the inspiring work my fellow MFA students are posting on Instagram, I’m dipping my toes back in at @jvoss.doonerakphoto. I plan to use this blog to talk more about Instagram images or post other images as well that might not make it to Instagram. My website will get a redo with more recent images- for now its the same old stuff but differently organized.

For my first semester I’m working differently, for which I credit recent MFA graduate Nancy Farese and her ideas about creative play plus the Zen work I keep reading. For now I have switched from a highly deliberative mode (careful focus, exposure just so, tightly composed, tripod-mounted, not a leaf stirring before triggering the shutter) to an approach as spontaneous and non-technical as possible. I am making photographs using a pinhole lens (see below for more on pinhole). The only decisions I make are where to point the camera and how long to keep the shutter open- no need to focus, no f-stops to pick, no worries about extraneous details that are obscured anyway in a pinhole image. In May and June I put the camera around my neck and turned on its intervalometer to take a silent picture every five seconds- any time I saw anything interesting all I had to do was hold still for a few seconds to get an image. I wandered all over the place- the farmers market, the skate part, the downtown mall, the woods behind my house. Keeper images are rare, but all I am spending are photons and my time. This pinhole approach has been highly liberating although I am back to using a tripod for some images like this one.

This photograph of sunflowers is from a farm a few miles from home that I have wanted to photograph in the past but never managed to do. I drive by this spot nearly every day, but the fields are somewhat hidden from view unless one is paying close attention. This Image is just camera + pinhole lens + sunrise. I think the sunflowers are bending their heads in prayer to their Sun God at dawn. Very Spinoza to my way of thinking. Sorry if your God is different, no offense intended.

More about pinhole, also called camera obscura. This is old technology dating back to the Phoenecians. A pinhole lens is a very very tiny aperture- my wide angle goes as high as f/90. A pinhole lens with a mirrorless camera produces an image on the sensor with infinite depth of field and everything is more or less in focus, depending on how small a pinhole one uses. Pinhole lenses introduce all kinds of artifacts and weird effects. I find that to be part of their charm!

Finally I will be at the Crozet Arts and Crafts Festival in October. Please stop by, I should have a few pinhole images printed up by then!