The Brown Knowser

It was a last-minute trip. We hadn't made big plans, didn't create an itinerary. We also went camping. A couple of years ago, in the summer of 2014, DW, my daughters, and I sat in a cozy restaurant in the H ô tel du Château, in the town of Beynac, in southwestern France. Above, the town stretched upward: upon the hilltop, Château de Beynac looked down onto the Dordogne River and our campsite, Capeyrou. It was a pleasant dinner. We were dressed up, relaxed, having enjoyed a leisurely day of kayaking and canoeing the river, starting upstream, at Vitrac, passing the small towns and châteaux that line the Périgord. Calmly, I told my beloved family that I was having a wonderful vacation, how I loved being back in Paris, loved the beaches and towns of Normandy and Brittany, and had loved the Loire Valley. The  Périgord had been surreal, and I couldn't wait to make our way to Carcassonne and, eventually, Provence. But this evening, this very evening, would be my last nig...

Look through your photos , I told myself, you'll find something . I was, of course, looking through the folders of photos that I've shot over the past couple of months but had done nothing with. They're sitting in those albums, awaiting editing, looking for me to pull out a story. I found an album with a quick photo that I captured of the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa's castle. From the angle, near the pedestrian underpass that takes you to the southwest corner of Rideau Street and Sussex Drive. I looked at the angle of the shot and was reminded of one that I shot, more than 30 years ago, with my Minolta X-700. While this shot was near sunset, the old photo was from after dark. I tried to remember if I had scanned the photo, which was captured on E-6 film: slide. I have several external hard drives that hold a vast number of my photos, but only one holds digitized images, captured with a device that projects negatives and slides. I moved from the drive that held the...

There's nothing like being out at night, on a deserted road, out of sight, under an overpass, alone, vulnerable, that makes the tiny hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's cold, outside, but you shiver from within. The road had only recently been closed to all but local traffic, though there was no one who would use it, other than as a throughway. And the throughway was not an option: a smaller sign, next to the imposing Road Closed sign, read No Exit . I turned down it, nevertheless. I came to the overpass, beyond which a rise in the road concealed what lay ahead. I turned off my engine, but seeing that I was now in complete darkness, decided to engage the hazard lights. Orange beacons, warning somebody—should somebody come from the direction of no exit—that there was life beyond the dip, under the overpass. I got out of the car and knew that I was completely isolated. No one could see me from the highway above. It would take a keen eye to see the blinking...

More than my desire to write, over the past couple of months, has been my desire to catch the light as it reflects off the objects that are captured through my camera's lens. And yet, as I've taken thousands of photographs in this time—indeed, the several thousand photos this year—I find that my desire to process those images has waned. I have hundreds of unprocessed photos still stored on the data cards in my camera. I have focused on the images that make it to my Photo of the Day project, and have ignored all the others. When I have taken the time to remove the images from my camera, they have been cataloged in hard drives and forgotten. I need to give them some love. Some have stories that accompany them, and those stories need to be told. Not today. Hopefully, though, some time, starting this week. I need to retrieve those images, need to bring them to life, and then tell the stories. This weekend, I gathered all of the cameras that are in my house, minus ...

I don't know if it was laziness or fatigue, if I felt that I wanted to focus on other aspects of my life, if it was that I simply wanted a break from writing and processing photos, or if it was a combination of all of those factors that made me walk away from The Brown Knowser . On the writing front, I felt uninspired. I had a few ideas for posts, as I almost always do, but was tired of the flat, trite words that tend to make their way from my brain to my fingers that move over the worn keyboard. I'm not sure that I've found the inspiration to write better prose, even as I string these words together. I don't always think about how I'm going to write before I compose those thoughts. I just let the flood of images, ideas, and random, fleeting opinions that flow without restraint. I need to stop doing that, but I don't know that this is that time. I was considering changing the format of The Brown Knowser . I was even going to change the name but I still l...