Letters or e-mails or blogs

I’m getting ready to head out to my garden shed and do some spring prep-work on my lawn tractor. It needs new belts, a new oil filter, who knows what else and I want to have that all taken care of before spring arrives. Now is that forward thinking, or what?

At any rate, taking a couple minutes to write this post isn’t really to avoid going out in the cold . . . one of our coldest days this winter season. I just want to make certain the day doesn’t get away from me and I forget to share this thought with my photography friends.

I was sitting in front of my fireplace the other night, reading a couple books that had just arrived. I expect that I will be share thoughts spurred by these books for some time. The one that’s on my mind today comes from Single Exposure – Random Observations on Photography, Art & Creativity by Brooks Jensen, who also happens to be the editor of LensWork, an online magazine I mentioned the other day. Today I was reading a quick piece of Brooks’ that got me thinking about the fact that we don’t seem to write many letters these days. Of course we have business letters, legal letters, official correspondence type letters. But, we don’t write letters to family and friends like we did when I was a young man just starting out.

I’m thinking about letters that just shared what was going on in our lives, with we cared about. When I was in the service, especially overseas, I used to write at least one letter, in long hand, almost every day.

It might be said that e-mail, blogs, Facebook and other social media have taken the place of letters. But, I can’t recall the last time I read an e-mail or Facebook post with any real personal connection.

I’m as big an offender (if you will) as anyone. My blog and Facebook posts are almost always limited to some technique, critique, or lesson related to photography. Seldom are they just to share something that’s going on in my life, albeit my photography life, with family or friends who might care about this little tidbit or another.

A half-dozen of us, guys all, photographers all, will be heading to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks for a winter weekend of photography soon. Of course the underlying purpose of our trip is to do some photography. But, I’m hoping we can sit around the fireplace or maybe even a campfire in the evenings and just share our photography experiences . . . like people used to do in letters . . . or around the dinner table . . . or in front of a cozy fire in the living room.  I wonder what we’ll learn from each other.