Caitlin Burke

As an exercise to prepare for my weekly shot project, I decided to make a shot list. I want it to have a dozen doable items, and I haven’t managed to write them all out yet. I do have 7 items on it now, but a few of them require materials I don’t have access to, so I want to keep working. I plan to do a shot this coming weekend, thought, whether my list is “long enough” or not.

In the meantime, I’m carrying a camera every day, which I’d got out of the habit of doing, and that feels good. It’s making me realize that it’s a bit of a challenge both to get a lot of exercise every day AND to get out and do photography. While holding down a full-time job. We’ve had a special project going at the office lately that I’m tempted to use as an excuse, but that’s not the reason I’m moving slowly on this.

This photograph was taken through the window at an antiques shop near my office. I took it with a film camera, and I’ve definitely found over the last year and a half that when I need a kick start, it helps to shoot a roll or two. I pick up my most recent two rolls (from developing) the day after tomorrow, and I have another dozen rolls of a half dozen kinds of film waiting to play with. My project will be digital, for practical reasons, but film sharpens the mind and disciplines the movements.

Illustration by Jamie Fales

The majority of my photography is urban and nature observation. Over the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally set up shots, and in the last year or so, I’ve started to get – even become preoccupied by – ideas about photos I’d like to build, piece by piece, even a series or several.

My first posed subject was my friend Amy. She’s an actor, and she was happy to give over a whole day to me one winter. I think I took something like 400 shots that day. It was a wonderful experience for me, because it gave me a chance to slow down and try a lot of different things – angles, locations, and processing approaches.

Shortly after that, I participated in a project to create cinematic shots. For almost all the shots, I just kept an eye open for cinematic situations around me and tried to capture them. For one shot, I went out to the piers at night with a friend, and we walked around and looked for good locations, finally making this shot. Again, we had no concrete plan, just a general idea of where we wanted to go, and then seeing how the spirit moved us when we got there.

This year I’ve wanted to step up my game, and I’ve made – or at least designed and styled – a couple of shots I am truly happy with. Now it’s time for me to do more, and it has been for a while. I’m going to need help in the form of external pressure, though, because I haven’t been taking the further steps I need to on my own. So this is an announcement of my new project: One deliberately styled and directed shot per week, at least 12, until I finish a coherent series or at least figure out what I want to do next.

Do you have a suggestion or request? I can’t promise to honor it, but I’d love to hear it!

I had an allergy attack last night. This is about how it felt (minus the brief moment of delight at encountering a lovely flower).

I think of starlings as a Central Park thing, but of course we have them in Golden Gate Park, too (even if starlings probably weren’t part of the desire to develop the “outside lands” in this way). This was one of a band scavenging around Stow Lake a couple of weeks ago. They were being handily outcompeted by the local blackbirds, from what I could tell, but they struck some nice poses in the trees.

Is it wrong to be in love with someone else’s cat?

It is, isn’t it? OK, I’m in love with his whole stream.

January 2009 Update: He is now publishing photos at endustry.com.

“A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime.”

More at their website.

Three-Day Novel was a trial for my cat, too. I was around the apartment all the time. I was staring at the screen and not paying attention to him. I was going back and forth between the kitchen and my computer and not stopping to fill his bowl. Or replace the (perfectly good but apparently dull) food therein.

Monday afternoon, he looked so pretty in the sun that I came over to take some pictures of him, and he was having absolutely none of that.

To my great surprise, I did it. I did almost everything differently this year, and for the first time I came out of the weekend feeling better than when I went in.

In previous years, I’ve cleared my schedule, decided not to cook but to buy prepared food locally at mealtimes, skipped exercise, stayed up late, and forbidden myself to have any Internet or social contact for the entire weekend. I’ve also spent the last couple of weekends before the event actively working to outline at least one story idea, sometimes more. I’ve emerged from these weekends feeling sleep-deprived, anxious, and critical, or ended up writing practically nothing after I went ahead and did something forbidden and then lost my momentum.

This time pretty much my only constraints were a cleared schedule and no in-person social contact. I did no outlining and only came close to brainstorming about stories once – on the Thursday morning before the weekend – and was almost immediately derailed. I got at least 3 days of healthy food ingredients that I just plain like, plus some treats for every day. I resolved to exercise for at least 2 hours each morning (and did so, along with another hour in the evenings), and to go to sleep before half past midnight each night (again, success). I did not use an alarm clock. I also allowed myself to check email and a couple of websites a couple of times a day, although I (almost totally) avoided responding or participating.

In other words, I acted natural. I went through each day more or less as a normal workday, but instead of going to the office, I sat and made stuff up.

The process change I was the most concerned about was skipping the outlining step. I did use a structural prompt, though. Contest materials say the average story is about 100 pages, so I made a word-processing document with 100 blank pages, and every time I started to write, I didn’t stop til I got to the end of a page (about 250 words). Sometimes I did two at a time, but either way every time I started typing, I had a specific goal that was, at completion, visible on a single screen. And in a departure from previous years: I ended up cutting words to meet my immediate storytelling goal within my page rather than typing whatever popped into my head. I think this structural decision is the single element that is most responsible for what I see as the tightest, most even writing I’ve ever produced for this contest. Having hour-plus blocks of exercise during which I could think things over definitely helped, too.

I’m not submitting it for judging, but for the first time I believe – rather than take on faith – that I can produce a manuscript in this timeframe that is a credible competitor. This is a new feeling, even after years of confidence that I accomplish something valuable every year. I did do one superstitious thing every night before a writing day: I read through the notes I made about all my noteworthy dreams over the last couple of months (about 750 words in all). I didn’t write my dreams into my story, but it was a soothing, centering exercise that led nicely into sleep.

The 3-Day Novel Contest