One Shoot Sunday: An Interview

I was invited recently by Chris Galford (a manager with the online publication One Stop Poetry) to participate in an "email interview." Our exchange (along with a sampling of my images) was published earlier this morning. While I was honored to be asked to participate - the website has archived an impressively varied selection of interviews with talented photographers that one can spend hours perusing and being inspired by! - I was truly humbled by the wealth of creativity that my humble little "Homage to Friedrich" image (reproduced here) spawned from readers of the interview!

Since the focus of the One Stop Poetry site is to foster a dialog between visual and verbal artforms, the interview concluded with a challenge to readers: namely, to write a poem that is inspired by the accompanying image (called the "Skies of Skye," that appears in my Scotland portfolio).

I was deeply moved by both the number - and sheer beauty - of responses to the challenge! My favorites (though, in truth, I must really list them all, as they are all exceptional!)- and in no particular order - are poems by Pete Marshall, Gigi Ann, Claudia, Louise Gallagher, Adam Dustus, Glynn Young, Tammy, Maureen, Melissa Campbell, Ruth, Ranee Dillon, Hedgewitch, Libithina, and the ones on the Reflections of..., She's Writing, and Another Man's Dream blogs. I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to read my interview, and even more so for the time and effort they put in to posting such wonderful works of poetic art on their own sites.

Kudos to all!

Postscript #1: I have written of this "poetry challenge" image before on my blog (see here). The image was taken near Teangue, Skye, on the next to last day of our trip to Scotland in 2009 (before we headed off to Edinburgh to catch our flight back to the states). The sun was setting, but we had a bit of time for some last minute exploration. I was busy taking close-up shots of rocks and water, with my back toward the water where my wife was standing (I was in my usual crouched position, glaring starry-eyed at the compositional marvels on the exposed beach, and - also, as usual ;-) - "oblivious" to what I was really searching for ;-) I finally stood up to give my knees a rest, and while stretching my back swung around to look for my wife. What I saw I was magic and thus not something that can easily be translated either into words or images, but I did manage to catch a fleeting glimpse of the ineffable with my camera. What it recorded is reproduced in the photograph above, and is among my top three favorite images from our entire trip.

Postscript #2: While on the subject of interviews, here is a link to an interview I did with Brooks Jensen (editor, Lenswork magazine) for my Micro Worlds portfolio that Lenswork published in issue #76 (May-June, 2008). The mp3 version runs ~40 min, but (unfortunately) is not free; cost is 99 cents (proceeds go entirely to Lenswork).