Falling Flat
For most, 2025 was a pretty shit year. Sparing you the o-poor-me soliloquy of what 2025 was; the start of 2026 is a little like this photo. Flat Depth and quite literal best intentions, and a little bit of a very much me thing. This photo is from Japan, probably October, but may have been the August trip. These still exist in Japan, the metal jungle-gyms. (ジャングルジム if you’re so enabled). They don’t exist in the states because.. well from memory during the summer they induced third degree burns and someone always had a broken limb of some sort. So it’s nostalgic and was cool to find and I spent some effort to get it head on. Level. Aligned. Which I did. The result? It’s a super flat photo, with no depth to show the layers, it appears almost as a clock face. You kind of have to dig in to find the layers and the line up.
For most, 2025 was a pretty shit year. Sparing you the o-poor-me soliloquy of what 2025 was; the start of 2026 is a little like this photo. Flat Depth and quite literal best intentions, and a little bit of a very much me thing. This photo is from Japan, probably October, but may have been the August trip. These still exist in Japan, the metal jungle-gyms. (ジャングルジム) if you’re so enabled. They don’t exist in the states because.. well from memory during the summer they induced third degree burns and someone always had a broken limb of some sort. So it’s nostalgic and was cool to find and I spent some effort to get it head on. Level. Aligned. Which I did. The result? It’s a super flat photo, with no depth to show the layers, it appears almost as a clock face. You kind of have to dig in to find the layers and the line up.
Like this photo, I was nostalgic for being a part of a larger group. It’s been many years and life is very different now. Using photography as that bridge, I took a leap of faith, and a deep breath. It’s a very open group known as Beers and Cameras, fairly successful, and looked.. well, fun.
Except that my day starts at 330 in the morning. I had lunch at 1030. Sitting in the bar, watching the pretty obvious attendees.. show up. Many years younger. A little (or a lot) slimmer. Most of them with Leica’s hanging from their necks. I’m not stranger to crowds or strangers (as evidence by the photos you can see). But for some reason I tensed up. Surely the Old Fashion I had would take the edge of. Perhaps the second one.
By the end of the night, I had become that wobbly old man who talks a bit too much, probably in spurts of unconnected commentary, sounding more like he’s trying to dispense wisdom instead of talk about the shared experience of photography.
At one point, I felt wobbly, and some how extracted myself. Knowingly, the point when you notice that you yourself are wobbly is about several lifetimes after you were indeed wobbly. I could hear myself, in some sort of sync delay, speaking in disconnected sentences, a bit rambly.
Like the photo, things fell flat, and the remainder is a 2 dimensional impression that’s pretty hard to get around. And a fairly tall bar tab.