Introduction

and why I'm here.

I'm a self-taught photographer. (Isn't everybody?) Probably. In fact, as I develop this site, my own philosophy about how we learn, why we learn, and how much of what we do or think we know is based quite a lot on our self talk that goes on within our brains. The 'teacher' we listen to most, for good or for ill, happens to be ourselves. Coach that teacher to become a better teacher, and the student, still ourselves, can benefit immensely.

I'm not going to introduce much about my specialities at this time. If you've read this far, you may be curious, or you could be a photographer yourself, or perhaps you are a friend or acquaintance who wants to be nice and say you actually read my post.

If you want to know a bit about my photography, feel free to check out the first of a series of three articles published about me in relation to photographing storms over on Topaz Labs' blog. When you're ready to read that, here's the link to the series: http://blog.topazlabs.com/jeff-mcpheeters/

If you're curious to see more than read, you can find my Instagram feed at https://www.instagram.com/macalterego/ and if anything there suits your fancy, I'm happy to share the journey with you.

Did I mention I'm a historian? Self-taught really. Well it was a minor in college but I'm leading you to my thought that we're all by nature, historians.

"All living beings have their own evolution and their own life span. But human beings are the only living beings who know that they live while they live -- who know, and not only instinctively feel, that they are going to die. Other living beings have an often extraordinary and accurate sense of time. But we have a sense of our history, which amounts to something else. Scientific knowledge, dependent as it is on a scientific method, is by its nature open to question. The existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the past in our minds, is not. We are all historians by nature, while we are scientists only by choice." ~John Lukacs, Remembered Past, on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, ISI Books, www.isibooks.org, 2005.

My own interaction with the remembered past has implications sometimes profound and at most times, perhaps, diffuse, is terms of the way I compose and interpret a scene, a portrait, or even the decisive moment recorded in a photograph or series of photographs. Some photographs illustrate the split second timing that determines, often enough, success or failure in making a photograph worth keeping let alone publishing. Most aren't that momentus. They are more like a portrait of a person you may or may not be familiar with but whose gaze and countenance give you pause and beg a question or two.... what just happened.... what may be about to happen.... what mood is it and does it portend a story of my own imagination or one that seems obvious from clues within when combined with my own experiences and historical knowledge of something similar, something familiar to my recollections?

Perhaps that's the question I'll leave you with here in this rough beginning. Sometimes it's enough to just stand and gaze and wonder. Sometimes there is nothing more that needs to be said or recorded. We simply see, observe, take in what we can, remember in our own way, and we're never quite the same again.

(composed and written while listening to Caledon Wood, by Al Petteway, https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/caledon-wood/36138816)