The Ones I Like List of 2010 [#10]
©2010 Katya Horner. All Rights Reserved.
Houston. Work photos. I don’t often include them in these year-end lists. I don’t know why. I guess it has something to do with impetus and “get up and go” and inertia. Something to do with paying bills, administration, licensing terms. Something to do with “it’s all mine” – from inception to reception. I’m funny that way.
2010 wasn’t an easy year for me when it came to photography. While things kept skipping along on the professional side of things, the personal side of my craft – well, “frustrating” would be generous. It didn’t boil down to the particulars, this frustration – fogless fog seasons, painful heel spurs, the death of my wide angle lens…and my computer…and my backup camera’s backup camera. It was more basic than that. My frustration was borne out of thinking too much. Like many creative types, I need a clear, almost blank mind to shoot my personal work. I need to be freed of the questions marks that surround creation – why are you shooting this cow…in this manner…with this lens…and that camera setting? And how will you process it once taken? And where will you post it once it’s processed? Why? What? How? To what end? The percussive questioning, while it certainly provides a rhythm, does little to encourage unrestrained creativity. I want my photography to be a snowboarder, not a cross-country skier. I want it to be experimental jazz. Goulash.
I chose Houston, an “outtake” from a shoot for Downtown Magazine, as #10 on my The Ones I Like List because the experience of shooting it was one of my most memorable photography experiences of the year. It was an absolutely gorgeous, blissfully still spring evening. I was standing, alone, on the roof of the downtown Aquarium. Just me, my camera and the pulse of the city. The skyscrapers. The ferris wheel. The cars whooshing by on I-45. It was everything my personal photography was not in 2010. It was free.
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Listening to in 2010: Adam Lambert’s For Your Entertainment
