Shooting in The Covid Part I: My Garden and Neighborhood

It has been a while since I published my last blog. The hiatus isn’t because I haven’t been writing. I have been doing a lot of writing.

I am filled with anger and frustration. I’ve been this way for almost four years, but my emotions and thoughts have been intensified since March. I started calling one of my senators since before the impeachment hearings. What started as pleas to include witnesses and to vote for impeachment became a daily litany of grievances about the destruction of all the good our country stands for based on our Bill of Rights and Constitution. My next blog was going to be an open letter to this senator. It was going to be filled with rage and about 400 pages long.

I just can’t do a 400-page angry rant every week. I already spend an inordinate amount of time in the sadness machine. Devoting my life to anger and sadness is probably not a good use of my time here on the planet.

This blog is going to be published in multiple parts, because I am going to focus on how and where I’ve been doing my photography during The Covid. There’s no way I can avoid writing about what is going on around us. The social, political, public health and economic disease is impossible to ignore and impacts all our lives in the most intimate ways. When you have anxiety about leaving your house or being with your children and grandchildren and 95-year-old mother, there’s no ignoring or denying any of it.

The Corona virus accounts for a portion of our public health and economic crisis. Most of our predicament can be ascribed to mental illness, incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and greed. Our country doesn’t often find itself in this kind of turmoil, but our constitution does provide for a check on evil mayhem by giving congress the authority to remove a dangerous whack job who is hellbent on destroying our way of life or actually destroying the planet and all of it’s inhabitants. This authority required the republican senators to do their job. They’ve spent almost four years cowering in silence. When the musical is written about this time in our lives, they’re going to be the chorus of cowards and traitors. They’ve pretty much lost credibility on everything under the sun.

The summer was shaping up to be one of the more spectacular opportunities for me to grow in my photography. The Siegel Rare Neuroimmune Association (SRNA) had a retreat planned in June which was going to take place on the Jersey shore. A week on the beach and ocean with my camera would have been wonderful. We were then going to spend a weekend at Johns Hopkins for an education program. It would have been a weekend at the Inner Harbor with my camera. The SRNA family camp would have taken place in July. The week for me is filled with portraits and documentary photography. In August we had an education program scheduled in Salt Lake City. Following the symposium, I had a two-week adventure planned with good friends which covered all the national parks in southern Utah. These adventures would have been enhanced with trips around Ohio. I’m blessed that Nancy loves nature and hiking. Nancy is incredibly supportive of my photography passion.

All these trips have been cancelled.

My photography excursions have been limited to finding the psychological strength to leave my house with my camera and a mask.

The mask. The mask has become a worldwide phenomenon with universal agreement that wearing one protects the wearer and everyone around them from spreading the virus. It is a simple, inexpensive and easily understood strategy for not getting sick or dying.

How did the mask get to be such a monumental disaster in our United States of America? The Orange Emperor doesn’t like the way he looks in a mask? Does he like the way he looks in his hair? Does he know he’s orange?

He’s conflated this apparel with the whole ‘live free or die, don’t tread on me, join or die phenomenon. I’m guessing that Christopher Gadsden and Benjamin Franklin would have worn a mask to protect themselves and their grandparents. It is just crazy to risk one’s life and the lives of friends and family to make a shallow and misinformed statement about freedom.

Some perspective. I am the president of an organization that advocates for people who have auto-immune disorders where the immune system attacks the central nervous system. The brain, the spinal cord, the optic nerve. Pauline had transverse myelitis. Her immune system attacked her spinal cord which left her paralyzed from the waist down. These disorders are found everywhere in the world, among every group of people. Both males and females are equally impacted and it can happen to any age group, from children as young as four months old to seniors into their 70s and 80s.

Total freedom for an individual has never occurred in any society on the face of the earth at any time. Anyone who thought that notion was a great idea likely died during Noah’s flood or was consumed in Sodom or Gomorrah by fire and brimstone. You live in a society, you have rules. That we live in a free society doesn’t mean that people can do whatever they want. You can find tons of great information about what it means to have economic freedom, freedom of religion and free speech in America, as well as just how imperfect these freedoms are for some groups of people in our country. I won’t get off on that tangent. Suffice it to say, even though we have tremendous freedom in our country, there are serious, reasonable, necessary, and appropriate constraints to individual freedom. Those constraints are a very good thing because they create order, predictable behavior, and rules that allow us to raise children to be good citizens and good humans when they reach adulthood. Total individual freedom is unmitigated chaos. That’s why we force you to carry automobile insurance and to wear a seatbelt.

The people from my community, by definition, have a deranged immune system. If you get the corona virus with a perfectly normal immune system, you are still in for some trouble, because it is a novel virus, your immune system has never experienced it, and you could likely get really sick and/or die while the immune system is creating anti-bodies for it. If you have a deranged immune system, you are likely going to be in even more trouble. The vulnerability for my community is compounded by the fact that some people who experienced damage higher on their spinal cords develop problems with their ability to breath. Some people have lost the ability to breath and they need mechanical help (ventilators) to stay alive. Bottom line, people from my community cannot be exposed to covid 19. The risk for them is inordinately high and life threatening.

If your freedom involves putting my community at risk or killing people from my community, you do not have the right to that individual freedom.

I would love to move everyone who needs this freedom to an island. You so deserve each other. Please bring a copy of Lord of the Flies with you. It will offer you wonderful guidance for your adventure with unbridled individual freedom.

Earth to humans, earth to humans, please leave the wild animals where they belong - in the wild - and try the veggie burger.

Pauline experienced less than a year of the Orange Emperor and she’d quickly lost any patience with him. She couldn’t stand to see him or listen to him. She stopped watching the news or reading a newspaper. Knowing only made her angry. I have no idea how she would have managed the total societal implosion we’ve experienced since the beginning of the year. I’m grateful that Pauline is missing this chaos.

Over the past five months, I’ve often thought that it would have been wonderful to be stuck in New Zealand, Iceland or Glacier National Park during The Covid. Not to be. I live in Columbus, Ohio. Photography gives me peace. In dire need of anything to find peace, I turned my photography energy in the direction of the nature to which I have access.

My earliest forays involved the backyard garden and the beautiful flowing trees on my street in the spring. The Covid requires some complicated logistics surrounding health and safety. I’m the only human in my garden. Unlike most of the parks in central Ohio, my bathroom isn’t locked and the toilet works. And I have a beautiful garden. Pauline orchestrated much of the design, so there’s lots of purple.

So much of my nature photography is informed by three photography classes I’ve taken. My teachers have been excellent and they are also exceptional photographers. The classes were Macro Photography, Environmental and Studio Portraiture and Aesthetics and Design. I learned so much from them about composition. In many ways, I shoot my small scenes in nature photography the same way I shoot portraits. I look for subjects with interesting light, contrast, textures, shapes, and color and then I search for interesting backgrounds. I usually shoot with the narrowest depth of field. As in a portrait, I am trying to separate the subject from the background so that the viewer is directed to the focus of the composition. The background, however, is as relevant to the composition as the subject. That might be the most valuable notion I learned from my Macro teacher.

I’ve been shooting this spring with a 100mm macro lens on my Canon 5D Mark III. I usually shoot with the aperture wide open which is 2.8 with this lens. That is the shallowest depth of field. It gives me the greatest separation from the subject and I like the painterly backgrounds that result. With the aperture that wide open, there is a small sliver of focus available. When shooting small subjects with an extremely narrow field of focus, it helps to use a tripod. Even a light breeze can create focusing problems.

My camera is heavy. My tripod is heavy. I have arthritis in my hands, back, neck, shoulders and hips and I have no cartilage left in my knees. Until I purchase a lighter camera (mirrorless) and a much lighter tripod, I’ve been doing almost all my photography handheld. You can do a lot with Lightroom and Photoshop to repair in-camera errors, but there’s not much you can do with an image that is out of focus.

When it comes to my compositions, I’m always first drawn to the abstract. That is where my mind and my eyes turn, to the shapes, colors, textures, light, contrasts. It almost doesn’t matter to me what the subject is – which might explain why my aesthetic involves abstracts. Abstracts quite literally means that the context doesn’t matter. The closer one observes nature, the more astounding it becomes. And, literally, the closer you look at nature, the more magnificent the patterns and symmetry. I’m sure there are evolutionary explanations for these patterns. They are beautiful to discover and shoot. And the reality is that without photography, I would have never found them.

That’s the beauty of shooting this way during The Covid. It doesn’t matter whether I’m shooting the petals of a tulip or the walls of a one-hundred-foot cavern, the images can feel very much the same. When it works, it is wonderful. When it doesn’t work, it counts as good practice.

I did end up calling Senator Portman yesterday. I told him that I watched the Chris Wallace interview over the weekend and was concerned that if the Orange Emperor is defeated in November, that he might not leave the Whitehouse. I asked the Senator to call me because I wanted to hear his plan for effectuating the peaceful transition of power. The Emperor’s words and the Gestapo beating up veterans and grandmas in Portland is way more than disconcerting. Houston, we have a problem.