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I looked at this image from Umbria this morning and wondered why I was working on it. I’ve been photographing the suburban environment I live in with a developing visual vocabulary. In Umbria, the suburban environment is very different and the resulting images reflect it.

It’s process. Spend time in a new environment and gain new visual impressions. For me it’s the essence of travel- getting out of one’s usual routines and ways of seeing. Then on returning, the daily reality doesn’t look the same.

Umbria is truly a beautiful place with extraordinary visual sights nearly everywhere. I’m not a travel photographer or a chronicler of Italian landscape. But I’m happy to share what I saw and hope that it helps to inform my more usual work.

These were stains on a wall I walked by every morning in Spello. They were constantly changing based on the light. Spello, like Assisi, is built of pink colored stone. All of the stucco and mortar are also tinted to complement the colors. It makes for one of the warmest environments you can image.

I had some anxiety about my image safety during my vacation. Just before I left, the hard drive on my Macbook Pro was scrambled and I rebuilt it from a Time Machine backup the evening before leaving. I then couldn’t find the external hard drive / card reader that I bought a few years ago.

I just downloaded images from cards onto the laptop during the trip, reviewing and then erasing the cards. A single copy of all of those images until yesterday when they were copied over to external drives, consolidated into the big Aperture library, and put into vaults.

It’s been a great 10 days in Italy. No real internet access for the entire trip. Tonight we’re in a hotel at the airport, prepared for an early flight out and back to the US.

Umbria light was much better for photography than that of Liguria two years ago. About 1500 captures, with a few winners already. This was quickly processed just in Aperture using the Nik filters.

I needed a photo of myself for a professional event. I used window light from the right and an off camera SB-800 shooting into an umbrella off to the left. My daughter actually did the focus and capture, I cropped.

I like the style as a portrait actually. It’s not that far from my usual images, just much more naturalistic given that it’s a face, not a field or walkway

Finally, I’ve picked up the Nikon again. It was cold. It was rainy. It was raw. But I’m going to be traveling to Europe next month and it will be my biggest opportunity for interesting image harvesting in a long time.

Its interesting how rapidly I can get back to where I left off. At least there was some light yesterday when I captured this image. With my current toolbox I can work around a lack of interesting illumination, its much better if I have something to work with to start.

I’m reading Geoff Colvin’s “Talent is Overrated” right now. It’s a great discussion of getting good at doing things by deliberate practice. Of course for me at 51, it comes too late. My kids should be reading it.

Whatever I’ve learned over the last two years is deeply ingrained at this point. According to the literature, if I work at this pace for another 15 years, I’ll be an expert. I’m developing vocabulary and technique slowly so that I don’t have to think so much about how to achieve a result, I can think more about whether the result was achieved.

Photography is like playing the piano in that its trivial to make an image or a sound with these instruments. Painting or playing cello has a longer learning period for producing anything.

I’ve started dabbling in making music over the last few months. It’s a scary feeling to be so adrift as complete novice. I don’t really intend to get very good, but its worthwhile exploring. I have a set of skills built over the years that helps in mastering completely new tasks that help, but the variety of choices that present themselves at every turn is truly bewildering.

I’ve got shelves of books on time management, leadership, and, of course, decision making. In the last two years, working as more of “A Creative”, I’ve moved more toward reading about personal achievement. Biographies are good and I just finished “Snowball” which will probably be the the definitive contemporary biography of Warren Buffet.

I’m now reading “Effortless Mastery” by Kenny Werner. It’s aimed at jazz musicians, but takes an approach to creativity that resonates with me. I was reading it on a plane trip home yesterday and realized that since I was going to in meetings during daylight, I didn’t bring a camera. As I was walking through the airport I realized that the iPhone I was holding was a camera and went into a visually receptive mode. The reflections in the steel columns were visually interested and I captured a few images during the long walk toward the car.

I had a short trip to the Boston Area. I brought the Sigma DP1 along. It was too cold to comfortably take photographs, but the DP1 proves itself over and over to me as a great travel companion. A small package that produces unique, high quality images. I found myself falling into the rhythm of single shot composition quickly. Base ISO, auto focus and program, evaluative metering. Easy.

January 1 and I’m back on the bike. With 26 degree F tempertures and gusty winds, it was an indoor training session.

Just a year ago, I wrote about my first experiments with 8 second intervals. There was a buzz about a publication from Australia showing that very short high intensity interval training was effective training both for improving fitness and weight loss.

What I liked about it was that it was a relatively easy way to get my work levels up to high levels rapidly on the bicycle trainer in a way that was hard work but seemed easier to achieve and maintain.

Interestingly on the bike today I didn’t get up into as high a heart rate zone today as I did a year ago. It felt like a mismatch between aerobic fitness and leg strength. The effort I was able to put at the pedals wasn’t enough of a demand to really push my heart rate up.

Unfortunately it may not be due to improved fitness but rather loss of power from being off the bike for a few months. I think this workout will be become a weekly staple for a while, so I’ll be looking for rapid improvement as I build back muscle strength specificity on the bike.

The other day I wrote about how equipment and workflow combinations either seemed easy or put obstacles in the way.

The other side of this of course is subject matter, locale and light. There’s a set of conditions that make it easy for me to create images that I like. I’ve always struggled against going the easy way, seeking growth in pushing myself to do things that are out of my reach. Over the last year, this included moving my images into three dimensions from the flat formal compositions that I mastered long ago.

For example, this image is near flat, but renders depth and subtle perspective. It’s a victory for me because a year or two ago I would have tried to take it straight down and flat. I now know that I would not have been able to compose the leaf plus tree reflection plus walkway into a coherent whole by limiting the angle of view.

My audience in this is primarily myself. I’m grateful for the new internet mediated means of sharing my work. Dozens of people see my work everyday on Flickr or here- something that wouldn’t have been possible if I depended on the old physically mediated world of galleries and books.

As I’ve been mastering one area, I’ve been pushing less successfully in another. While my subjects are more in the world, having setting and three dimensions, they still are not of the world. My subjects are generally insignificant, having themselves no real meaning. They reflect my visual world well, the suburban landscape, cities, sometimes landscapes.

To myself, I think of this next challenge as capturing a sense of place.