Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Balance" was not a term that came up often, if at all, during my studies of the psychology of discretionary time--or "leisure"--in the University of Maryland's then Department of Outdoor Recreation, a part of the College of Health and Human Services. It was through that experience that I found Maslow, and then through Maslow's philosophy found my way back to an English department, at UMD the "Department of English Language and Literature."
How I have for so long managed to juggle interests in the fine, literary, and performing arts along the lines of "writer, photographer, musician" and sub-definitions like, "editor and writer" or "copywriter" or "journalist" . . . well, the life wants for balance.
Those have followed my little arc know of the death of the parents, which harvest by God completed early in 2004, a bit of wrangling in the family over money, giving up on one girl and finding another (who is here), an apartment building fire on Feb. 3, 2006 in Laurel, Maryland, where I had lived for 15 years, and a move to what I like to call the "Santa Barbara of the D.C. area--specifically, Hagerstown, Maryland USA.
I moved up here as a photographer, and so be it, but "cookie cutting" that business to fit preconceived notions about photographers proves another challenge. The few things I know: I have, can, and will continue to shoot weddings. If you're not rich and can do it, you do it as "high wire" and pressured an engagement as it may be.
I know too that I am bringing out new catalog for commercial, decor, and editorial use, and that's work, no question.
Here, I may want to start covering The Great Recession, which may implode all the way into a Great Deflation, which we're all going to hate, but the politicians, local and national, are never so powerful as we would like to think them.
The plain fact of the matter in the sub-prime mortgage disaster is that legislators and bank officers both enabled and bank assigns--mortgage brokers--wrote billions of dollars worth of questionable loans and a great good many, possibly 5 million, have come home to roost.
No home?
- No shopping for home improvement items at any of the country's big boxes.
- Minimized personal stability if the apartment business doesn't pick up the slack.
- Nothing like adequate return-on-investment or loss-sustaining amelioration for the banks, their investors, and, frankly, the entire body of the economy.
That money, however much it may come to and for whoever was left holding the bag, has gone the way of smoke.
Vanished.
Hmm.
I'd like to blog more.
I would really like to get out of the "second row seat to history", which is the chair in front of my computer monitor, and out on a story no one else can see until I tell it.
I could do with an annual grant for an "Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quanity" of western Maryland-based local and international reporting.
Then there's photography, the declared, also well accounted, insured, and tax paying business: is it a part of everything else? Is it the real thing I do?
I'm going to advertise this winter for weddings.
I'm going to continue putting up on my web (www.communicating-arts.com) more JPEG's in galleries representing saleable, print-ready images.
And if "go out on a story", the cameras are coming with me!
Balance.
Then too, I expect to continue playing guitar and singing in bars, now and then, to my dying breath; also reading as I see fit; workin' things out with ma babe; going for a few more drives, a few more walks around small towns and parks.
And if you happen to know a magazine editor who needs to send a photographer to visit a garden, you have my e-mail address.
Balance?
Nothing sets the anchor like a paying gig.
A note on the photograph: recorded April 13, 2005, Patuxent River, Savage, Maryland, and it is a gorgeous 3008 x 2000 pixels, about 17 MB for printing.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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