[GR02.01] roses, indoors, Venice

42mm 1/30 sec f/5.6 200

Taken December 1st, 2019 – the day I bought a D3500, my first "real" camera, with a detachable lens camera and a manual mode and everything.

I think about that apartment in Venice all the time. I know I was depressed, because I said a lot of things like, "I am very depressed," and because I bought that camera in an effort to creative my way out of being depressed, and because I moved to Los Angeles to try to escape a professional situation that I believed was making me depressed, and because I took pictures like this, and because there were pictures like this to be taken all over my apartment.

But mostly in Los Angeles I remember being happy. Mostly I remember walking around and taking photographs, and walking down to the beach on lunch breaks, and liking and being liked in the LA office. I have to apply some effort to remember that, at the time, the main story I was telling myself was that I was having a very difficult time.

By the way – if you like this photograph and want to see more like it – I've finally set up a Premium Subscription. It's $10/month or $100/year. The main thing that you get is "scare Nat into writing more," but I'm also uploading the archives of my "pop-up" newsletters to the sponsor-only section of this website. These newsletters that were only ever published to e-mail, so they've been entirely inaccessible now that they're over. Many of them are very photo-heavy.

For example: Right now you can read the archives of Point Lobos, a newsletter I wrote over four days at the titular state park. It's about photography and California and creative jealousy and hiker hunger and houses built by wood mice. I'll be adding more newsletters and figuring out how to organize them over the next month or so.