There are two kinds of people, perhaps: those who are energized by the onset of summer, living their best experiences during the time, and those who feel the opposite, for whom summer seems too loud, crowded, hot and fast-paced. I have always been in the latter camp. If you’re in the former, I congratulate you. For me, the shoulder seasons (spring and fall) are the most energizing and engaging. I enjoy the variability light and weather, the juxtaposition of days which swing between the influences of winter and summer, and the gradual winding-up and winding-down of daylight.
The summer sunlight poses a particular challenge for photography. To be sure, it is one of the best times to shoot color negative film, which loves the light and renders some of its best colors during the sunniest season. But it can be hard to deal with shadows, which may become so deep they are unrecoverable, and with the wide variance between shooting in shade versus in the sun. As I often shoot in Seattle’s downtown, hedged by skyscrapers, the light can swing wildly from one part of a block to another.
None of this has to do with the doldrums mentioned in my title, though. For that, there may be fewer concrete reasons. Though concrete is part of the reason – it gets hot in the city! There is more of a mélange of reasons for me to feel less motivated in the summer: longer days disrupt sleep patterns, heat sometimes brings fatigue, travel and tourism spike on the west coast of the USA and elsewhere, and, for someone who shoots candid and street photography when I can, I find crowds and heat eliminate a lot of the interaction and spontaneity which I look for in a scene or subject.
Of course, the type of photography I do is often dictated by what’s happening around me, not by me, and so it is up to me to find what’s interesting. One (the earliest) meaning of the term “doldrum” refers to a person who is a dullard, an unmotivated and uninspired sluggard. I should take that as a warning to myself – as always, says common sense, maybe the problem is you!
It is probably alright for photography to take a bit of a backseat in the summer, as it usually does for me. There is plenty else to occupy my time. Some of it fun, some of it not so fun. Summer is, for me, when time feels the most sped-up, when a lingering thought in the back of my head suggests that it will never slow down again, only continue to accelerate until we are all displaced, wondering what happened.
I suppose that’s why the photographs I’ve taken in summertime often feel hard-won. Photography, after all, provides a way of freezing time, freezing our experience into a “punctum,” a moment laden with what we saw and felt all at once. As the pace of the world seems to spin up, as age creeps up with us, as we grow to take on more responsibilities and more roles in the lives and affairs of others, it becomes all the more important to continue to create these small reminders of our individuality. Every frame tells as much of a story about what’s behind the camera as it does about what’s in front of it. Let’s continue to tell the story about what’s going on behind the viewfinder.
The Sprocket Docket 