I’m not sure why or when I subscribed to CGP Grey to begin with, but I know when I’m being told to maybe leave my room a little bit more today.
I’m in that post-semester, pre-summer slump – sort of productive, sort of blazingly lazy, all kinds of stalled out. Suddenly got a burning urge to get some fresh air into my lungs and make things happen.
So I’ll keep this one short. You watch the video, and I’ll be digging my Penny Board out from under the mound of crap that’s in my trunk.
…but at first, I didn’t really even think I was going to touch this shot. The raw, unedited picture (which I can’t be bothered to post on here because it’s on my laptop, which is all the way downstairs, and I don’t really want to leave my computer chair right now :p) was completely washed out, slightly more tilted, and the highlights were blown to hell. Wasn’t really an obvious keeper in a day that was full of some other really nice portrait shots taken with my snazzy 50mm f1.8 lens.
Actually, I think I was just trailing behind at the end of our hike back down from the peak of the Stairway To Heaven in Vernon, my tiny kit 16-50mm screwed onto my Sony, just randomly snapping pictures out of slight exhaustion when I got this.
Not exactly an honest shot – the sky was starting to unfold from an otherwise dreary and overcast day in these light pinks and oranges, but nothing as cinematically sepia as this – but I like what came of trying to make something out of a picture that I normally would have tossed.
Enter October, where the autumn chill sets in and you realize exactly how busy you’re getting, and exactly how busy you just don’t want to be. Around this time every year is when I realize that I’ve been sitting in the middle of this tidal wave of ennui – where I don’t feel like doing shit, I haven’t pumped out content, and a lot of projects get paused in favor of settling into class, going through the motions, and getting through the day. Which is stupid, because every time I come back to just writing on this blog, I realize how therapeutic it is for me. I sort of vomit my thoughts onto a text box without thinking about it, and it honestly just feels better having it out there, regardless of who’s reading it.
So, court mandated blog time. Leggo.
These first two months of the semester sort of bring into sharp detail this mountain of shit that suddenly needs to get done on the day-to-day – obligations being born from the absolute paradise of nothingness that was my summer break. But everyone goes through that transition, right? You pry yourself off of the habit of waking up close to noon, having unhealthy brunch because of pure convenience, and being well acquainted with a well-rested state and get back to plugging away at life. It’s one of the most natural things in the world – leaves falling from trees. But for a lot of people I know, the slog drags out a little more than they’d like, and all of a sudden, they freeze. Life can only stay on the back burner for so long, and the first two months of fall often bring it back into focus at a startling rate, especially for people still out there trying to get that degree or build that portfolio.
You go from ease to crunch time what feels like a matter of minutes, and it’s easy to feel aimless. Lost.
Believe me, you’re not alone there.
It’s like dreadfully slow asphyxiation – air getting more and more precious as the deadlines and obligations mount, and you get more and more buried in whatever you need to devote your time to. The comparison of the now to the then makes you feel even more buried, more stifled, more suppressed.
Breathe.
It’s an overly simplified solution, and you may thing that it doesn’t even come close to cutting you lose of whatever’s keeping you down, but breathe. If it doesn’t pull you out, it’ll start to tug at those knots at the very least. Fixate on the fact that you’ve made it up until now – and that’s no small matter. What’s one more page? Or two? Or ten?
Despite what people may think of it, life was will be is good.
So take a breath. One big one. In and then out.
And I’ll see you tomorrow.
Before things get started around here, I figure I should take a moment to really introduce the concrete side of what Fernway does. I find myself chuckling whenever I try to call it a company, and it comes across sounding cult-y if I call it a group. In its most literal sense, Fernway is a YouTube channel that I started with my friend Patrick around February of this year. It’s a tiny channel that still only has one video on it: a modestly shot tribute to the town we’ve called home for nearly all our lives. Since then, we’ve been working hard on project number two, an ordeal of slightly larger scope, but still with similar thematic choices to the first. It’s a bit more work intensive, but it’s getting done, little by little.
Now I may have the order a bit skewed here, being that Patrick was taking pictures before we started the YouTube channel and I only really started afterwards, but it feels to me at least that testing the waters of tromping around town and taking pictures and videos of everything really sparked my interest in taking pictures. Eventually, I found myself commandeering my father’s Rebel T1i camera, paying out for a Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom subscription, and posting whatever I worked on to Instagram. Patrick and I both post up photos often, but I’m pretty sure the guy’s got at least three or four times more followers than I do. If you ever get the chance, definitely give the guy’s page a look. He’s come a long way in such a short amount of time. Or you could toss my page a spare glance. Maybe. Please?
But more to the point, I’ve been thinking lately that Fernway is more than just the FernwayFilms YouTube channel. It’s more of a network of creativity and expression that we plan to lay out with every new piece of work we put out there for people to see. Videos, photos, and even the contents of this blog all have their place in this figurative collage we’re laying out…all working towards making something, anything, resonate in whatever audience we reach.
This is what we’ve chosen to put our talents and our time into. Sitting here right now, I don’t even know if it’ll pay off in the end. But that’s not something that comes even remotely close to making me second guess this modest venture. Right now, I know it’s just something I love doing.
What else matters?
FernwayPress 