This picture is a result of my wandering around one these parks - The Caumsett State Park. I had posted a picture before about the stuff people leave behind - continuing that thought process, this above is a shoe. The left shoe, to be exact. Or - a 'keds' to be even more exact. Also, the shoe is near a well-like structure, with a hole on the top, but a very shallow bottom, and the bottom is cemented off. Letting my imagination run wild, I concocted a million theories about how the shoe got there....care to share some of yours?[....]

Then one day I decided to go through my archives of all my old pictures and I happened to catch a bunch of pictures taken in 1999. I was shocked with some of results - not with the ones that were really bad, but the ones that were actually somewhat good - and at the shockingly large number of pictures I took. I took myself back to that summer in 1999 and I realized that back then, I concentrated a LOT less on cameras, and photography as a 'thing', but concentrated more on the subject, and more on the moment itself. Since 1999, the rapidly technological advancement of digital cameras just bombarded us with more and more superior models, and the geek side of me embraced this wholeheartedly. But the thing I kept forgetting is that even the best gear in the world requires one thing from you - framing the picture - the most basic element of making a photograph. The better you do this, the awesome technology available today will most likely help you along. It's so easy to get distracted by the technology and the coolness factor, that one may forget why they are taking the picture, or what they are taking the picture of.

So having said all of this, I made a hypocritical choice to get over my creative block - I got another camera - but there is method to my madness - the reason I got it was because it takes me back to the days when I used to take pictures only with a Yashica GX rangefinder, and the process that I used to go through. It's a nice medium format TLR film camera, made by Rolleiflex – fully manual. Not only is it a humbling experience to not be able see instance results and have no automatic features to rely on, but it’s also a major joy when you look at the focusing screen and you get the shot you want. I find it helps me think much more about what I'm shooting, rather than how I'm shooting it (thats important, too - but its secondary, in my opinion, to the emotional factor). One of the results is what you see above - two artists discussing subjects in Southold, NY.

So what did I learn from all this? Everybody gets creative blocks at some point, and I’m sure they have their own process for getting out of them. Not all of them wo[....]

Long beach, New York[....]

Shahaar, last summer.[....]