Northport, Alabama

The beginning of a new month has finally arrived, and I must admit that I greet it with a certain amount of nostalgia. There are many things that I thought would be different by November, dreams that have changed, goals that have been set aside — for the moment anyway. I certainly didn’t expect that the beginning of the month would find me shooting kiwis in my kitchen, trying to keep the kiwi from sliding off the head of my SB-28 Speedlight and onto the floor as I directed the flash into the lens.

All in all, I think it worked pretty well. It would have probably worked better to set the kiwi on a light box and shoot it that way, but I don’t have a lightbox and didn’t feel like trying to make one. The Sto-Fen Omni Bounce worked well as a diffuser, though there is some light falloff at the edges but that could be due to the fact that I didn’t slice my kiwi evenly.

Nevertheless, this image marks three weeks of daily posts, and I am proud of that fact. It was hard to pick up my camera again after being turned down for a job that I really wanted. It was tempting to just walk away from it all, find a new career, move to another town, forge a new life. In the end, I did the only thing I knew how — I slammed a flash card into my camera and went in search of the next image, and somehow I found myself.

I would like to thank everyone who has visited this site over the past few weeks. Your comments and suggestions have enlightened me, encouraged me, and kept me going when the whole thing seemed pointless. And somewhere along the way, photography became fun again. Here’s to another month…