When Words Failed, Images Thrived
One Writer’s Visual Journey Through 2016
The photography itch struck me in 2016. Granted, it had always been there, a latent fascination for moments frozen in time and contained within a single frame. When I was young, I’d spend hours thumbing through family photos, replaying in my head the memories associated with those snapshots.
In my days as a newspaper reporter, I had the “opportunity” (thanks to some frequent staffing shortages) to do my own photography work on some assignments. I was a wordsmith by training; I could paint a picture with nouns, verbs, and adjectives, all of which I had the time to arrange at my desk after the fact to satisfactorily create my narrative. Photographers, as I quickly learned, their task is more challenging. They have to recognize a nascent moment and capture it in just the right manner and at just the right time to most effectively convey something with emotional resonance. When they get it right, the impact can be dramatic. Often, I didn’t get it right, and it’s a misguided notion that so many news organizations, these days, consider reporters and photographers interchangeable beasts. The professions operate on two complementary but distinct planes, and my best work as a reporter was always done in conjunction with one of our staff photographers on assignment with me.
So why, this year, did a writer, like me, put down his pen and pick up a camera? In part, I wanted to challenge myself creatively. While photographing for the news, I didn’t have all the time I needed to make my stories as visually compelling as they could have been, but I did start to gain an appreciation for things like lighting and composition. My eye was beginning to develop, but my technical knowledge wasn’t there yet. Despite having been a writer for the better part of 26 years, I still consider good writing a challenge, but it’s familiar territory for me. Photography really isn’t. So, I wanted to step outside of where I was comfortable and develop a new skill.
However, the biggest reason I began to gravitate toward photography is because in 2016, more than at any other time I can remember, words — the very thing I lived and thrived in — simply failed. They failed to convey truth. They failed to convey reason. They failed to educate. The only thing they succeeded in doing with any regularity was hurt people. And they were a currency that became markedly devalued. So many words by so many people, and none of it seemed to make any sense or do anyone any good.
In that respect, photography was a respite from the disappointment I felt over these things. When I look back over my photos from this past year, it’s not about the disappointments. It’s about the moments I’ve been able to lock within the frame…
This year I was limited to shooting with my iPhone. No zoom lense, so getting any detail on wildlife meant I had to be close — something notoriously difficult (and inadvisable) to do with most animals in the wild. During a Christmas party at a family member’s house, however, a raccoon decided to help itself to a dish of cat food just on the other side of a sliding glass door. There were a dozen or so people in the house at the time, most of which gathered near the door once we discovered the raccoon’s presence. I took a seat next to the glass and remained still. Eventually, the raccoon worked up the courage to stay in place, letting me get a few close-up shots.
During late fall and winter, I often have a good view of the setting sun on my way out of work. I’ve been capturing as many sunsets as I can this year, mostly to practice some of my Lightroom editing. Sunsets are good for pulling colors you didn’t even know were there out of your images. This particular sunset also happened to have a pretty impressive cloud formation, something that almost looked like smoke coming out of a chimney or a volcano. This was the second of two treatments I did on this particular shot, the first being the lead image of this article.
I got more pictures of my daughter, Hannah, than my son this year. No surprise there. She practically jumps in front of the camera whereas my son usually doesn’t seek the attention. With my lense trained so much on my daughter, though, I often find myself catching her in some unflattering moments. In this photo, she may look like she’s in pain, but I actually caught her in the middle of a yawn. She had been practicing a dance routine and basically tired herself out for the afternoon. I kept the frame to represent one of her more organic moments in front of the camera.
Hannah’s ballet classes were great opportunities to practice my technique in capturing movement. The iPhone 7 has a pretty impressive burst rate and buffer, so I can employ the tactic of “spray and pray.” This particular frame, however, was a moment Hannah was perfectly still and holding position. I leaned in, snapped a shot and put it in black and white (a color option I grew to appreciate most in 2016). The other shots here are ones where I was able to freeze her in motion, with only minimal artistic blur.
Look, here is one of those rare pictures where I not only captured my son, Liam, but got him to willingly smile for the camera. Here he had just jumped into a huge pile of leaves my wife had raked together in our front yard. I was able to slide the camera in front of his face and catch his smirk. I enjoy portraiture, but I like to have a little fun with the concept.
Of course, I didn’t get away from this day without also capturing some more action of Hannah…
This pond sits near my office on the campus of Southern Illinois University. Again, it was a chance to play with some color saturation and variation in Lightroom. If I had to have an artistic interpretation of this scene, I guess I was trying to get it to resemble a watercolor painting.
I’m interested to get more in-depth with street photography. I did a little practice during a Veterans Day parade in my hometown. Of course, my daughter was front and center, this time enjoying a cookie while sporting some fashionable shades.
Any year I can make it to a beach isn’t all bad. On a business-related trip to Boca Raton, Florida in September, a co-worker and I had enough downtime to visit nearby Deerfield Beach for about an hour or so. Out a handful of ocean-front imagery, this one caught me as particularly nice. The one thing I didn’t immediately notice was the silhouette of the lifeguard inside the tower. I saw that later when I was processing. Things like this have caused people to consider me a better photographer than I actually am. What often look like a planned element of my photo is usually just dumb luck.
The other image from this visit I liked was a sly candid shot I caught of a couple feeding pigeons along the waterfront. The photo below that is a street photo-style shot taken at the entrance of the International Fishing Pier. This pier got pretty banged up about a month later during Hurricane Matthew.
There’s a strict set of guidelines that come with the permission to photograph my wife. First, there is the minor esotericism in determining whether or not she even feels “pretty enough” that day for any shots to be taken. That, followed by hair, makeup, the concealment of any particularly bothersome blemishes, and whatever else about herself may be agitating her that day — once you can get past all that, you may just get her to agree to a photo. Imagine, it’s a Friday night and your spouse would like to practice some low-light portraiture. That’s the situation my wife was in. Surprisingly, she was amenable to the experiment and let me capture a few frames. She, of course, wasn’t satisfied with the results and would describe this as some of my worst work to date. I pull these two shots as my favorite because I got the the mix of light and shadow I was looking for.
Sometimes I like to capture the sweet moments. This shot was taken at a local winery, as my brother and his wife were celebrating birthdays. The shot I plucked as my favorite for this evening was one that caught my sister-in-law opening her gift but also caught my brother and mother in a tender moment while looking on.
During one week this year, I was tasked with checking in nightly on my mother’s cat, Lucy. Occasionally I would bother her with the camera.
This shot was a few things at once: Another great evening sky, a chance to capture Hannah at play candidly, and documentation that she did indeed break her arm this past year.
As I said before, I really started to appreciate black and white photography this year. It started dominating a number of my photos as 2016 wound to a close. This shot wasn’t anything special right out of the camera, so I placed a monochrome filter over it and turned up the blacks, creating a somber silhouette effect. I was happy with it.
Below are a couple of other black and white images I captured the same day…
Another cat photo, this one taken at a winery. He was eyeing a leap up to a shelf when I caught his profile. A little out of focus where it counts, but to contribute cat pictures to the internet is to make the world a better place.
These are a couple of very recent close-ups on my kids. I like to fill the frame, especially on them, as it always results in a more interesting shot.
By the time my kids’ school Christmas concert rolled around, I’d collected a decent number of good photos of them. I didn’t necessarily feel compelled to try and capture them among the rows of other singing students, so I opted to become an observer in a crowded room, looking for how many candid human moments I could freeze. Again, black and white seemed appropriate here.
A few days before the winter break, Southern Illinois University had the opportunity to host United National Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for what would be his final planned public address before his term ended. Almost everyone on campus showed up for the event, which meant the ballrooms were packed. I slung my office’s Canon Rebel over my shoulder and presented myself as “working media” (I am the editor of the alumni magazine) to get into the speaking venue after all the seats were technically filled. For whatever reason, the kit lense on the Canon wasn’t doing it for me, but by this point, I’d learned to be creative enough with the limitations of my iPhone. The following images are insanely cropped and treated with an “artistic darkness” that largely serve to hide the grain caused by a sensor with its ISO really being put to the test.
So, that was my 2016 in photos, at least my favorite photos or the ones that have the most story behind them. In closing the book on the year, I don’t know that anyone is going to necessarily have the fondest memories of 2016, not from a wider societal or cultural standpoint. No matter where you stood through the seemingly daily turmoil, you’d be hard pressed to characterize the year as calm or that you remained personally unaffected by it all. As I said before, my main takeaway from the year was disappointment and feeling a little lost trying to deal in a currency of words that didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Moreover, 2016 felt more like a beginning than an ending. In all honesty, unfortunately, the year felt like a prelude to bigger changes and, quite frankly, turmoil for the years to come. The images I took were a little bit of solace. They aren’t significant, they’re middling on the scale of photographic aptitude; they are, in the simplest terms, things that happened in front of me over a course of a few months.
I intend to continue my exploration of photography, honing my eye and skills in the coming months, perhaps with a more robust camera in hand. I keep most of my presentable images on my Instagram account, @bycalebhale if you’re so inclined to follow. I’ll leave you with a few more images below. Otherwise, cheers to the days ahead.
