Disruption, disturbance, moods, and a year passing in a park
Work
I’ve been in a bit of a contemplative mood over the past week. This sometimes happens when the seasons change. It also happens when there’s a change in my routine. Last week I had both at the same time: spring came to Montréal and Rebus came to a new office.
Add to that the mess in the office and I’ve not been quite myself all week, constantly distracted, and feeling overly contemplative. I definitely haven’t been at my most productive.
A few years ago doom and gloom would have overwhelmed me under these circumstances but, whether it’s a testament to the progress I’ve made over the past three years of self-reflection or to being generally less stressed overall, this time ‘the mood’ has mostly just consisted of nice long walks and letting my mind fill with idle thoughts while watching Murdoch Mysteries.
Instead of dark thoughts, I’ve been musing about my photography, my earlier writing and whether to take it up again, web media versus web apps as divergent but complementary creative forms, and trying to figure out whether to pick up a new long term side project or not.
No conclusions—expecting some only makes the mood worse—but overall feeling more positive than not.
(Not about the world as a whole—that’s going to hell in a hand-basket and will only get considerably worse before it gets better.)
Reading and Media
I wasn’t in a headspace to engage in much reading or substantive watching this week. At most I let an episode or two of Murdoch Mysteries play while thinking about something else.
Photography
I’m in the last stages of the Parc Jarry project and am now thoroughly bored by the park. The idea behind the project was to document the passage of life in the park over a year. Which turned out to be tricky enough to be interesting:
- You need to stick to a few consistent locations and angles for there to be enough visual continuity over the year.
- But you can’t be too consistent as then it ceases to be ‘a year in Parc Jarry’ and instead becomes ‘a year around that one tree’.
- You need to capture visual signifiers for the season somehow.
- Each picture needs to centre on something related to ‘life in the park’.
This was interesting enough to work on, but over the year I’ve become familiar with every corner of that relatively small park to the point of utter tedium.
I’ve been going through the photos I’ve taken since started the project late May last summer. So far I’ve boiled it down to two series: one that consists of thirteen colour photos and another that consists of sixteen black and white photos.
I may still slim the black and white series to thirteen as well but I don’t think I’ll be needing more photos for this particular project. Once I’m properly done I’ll put them up as photo galleries here on my blog with an intro—all fancy like.
I’ll need to be on the lookout for new photography projects. This time, they hopefully won’t projects that commit me to photographing a single location over an entire year. Short and simple projects. Maybe combined with some touristing around Canada. That sounds like fun.