Kathy & I value quiet as much as just about anything there is to value.  By quiet I don’t just mean sound, although that certainly accounts for a lot of it.  I mostly refer to the kind of quiet that means the absence of noise, both physical and mental.  By that I mean the constant background chatter, the incessant televisions that keep us “entertained” while we try to shop or have a meal, or the impatient and distracted “me first” drivers.  It can mean also mean something as simple as having to call the bank or the cable company for the eighth time about some problem that can never quite seem to be resolved.

We go to great lengths to make our home as peaceful as possible.  We don’t have a television.  It’s amazing how much difference that makes.  When we did have one we found that even when it was not on, it begged us to turn it on, to find something – anything – to watch.  That’s noise.  We love to listen to music, but when we do it is often smooth jazz or classical, with no words and no blaring horns or guitars.  There’s a time and place for the big band jazz and the vocals, but we save that for working in the garage or cleaning the house.  Our favorite play list on Spotify is called “Shhhhh!” (I made it up myself)

On our recent weekend with our friends Earl & Bonnie Moore, we found ourselves spending some quiet time at Swan Quarter Wildlife Refuge.  At the end of a mile or so long dirt road is a good-sized parking lot.  Why the parking lot is so large I have no idea, because in all the times we’ve been there I think we might have encountered just one car.  The parking lot was established for the Bell Island Pier, a beautiful fishing pier that extends perhaps 200 yards or more into Rose Bay Creek, which is an inlet of Rose Bay, the Pamlico River and eventually the Pamlico Sound.

Despite the sound of the wind and surf, this is truly a quiet place.  We enjoy spending time there, and enjoyed sharing it with Earl & Bonnie.  It’s a place that reminds us that there can be quiet anywhere, we just might need to work a little harder to find it.  There are a lot of spots like that everywhere.  A few of them I like to keep to myself, although they aren’t exactly a secret.  With others the key is to know when to go there and when to stay away.

Kathy & I have often discussed the possibility of relocating to eastern North Carolina.  There’s a lot to like out there.  It’s close(r) to the Outer Banks, we have made friends in Belhaven and Washington, and we’ve found that it’s just a great destination for a quiet weekend, whether I photograph or not.  There’s a noticeably slower and more relaxed pace out there.  It’s a pace we enjoy because it comes very close to the way we like to live our lives.

One of our objections to moving so far east is that it is so far from the other places we like to go.  It’s a good 5-hour drive from Charlotte, and another couple of hours or so to the mountains.  But at some point we realized that, being so far from everything might just be the point.  Maybe escaping the hustle & bustle, the traffic and congestion, might be worth the price of having to drive a little farther to get to some of the other places we love.  It’s hard to say for sure, but we may be on to something.  It’s possible that being farther from some things might bring you closer to others.

For the foreseeable future, home is where the jobs are, since it’s those jobs that allow us to have the house and travel to all of the places we like to travel to.  Down the road it might be another story, although I suspect the finally getting to the point where we can kiss the corporate world goodbye might lessen the need for escape.  That’s a hard scenario to predict.  But in the mean time, you can be sure that we will continue to seek the quiet places, whether they are close by or farther away.

Along the Pamlico River waterfront in Washington, North Carolina

I enjoy sharing my photography with other people, and the place I share the most is on my blog.  The thing that I enjoy about that is that most of the people who read my blog, or at least those who comment on my posts, read it because they enjoy reading what I have to say and enjoy looking at the photographs I’ve made.  I’ll occasionally get some constructive feedback about a process or technique I’ve used, but mostly it is just friends enjoying other friends’ photographs.  I like that.

I often have a hard time sharing my photography with other photographers, especially hobbyist photographers, because too often such discussions turn into what I call a “duck measuring contest.”  As soon as I show a photograph, someone has to pull out their iPhone and say, “Oh yeah, I got that.  See?” or “here’s my albino Lithuanian wildebeest from my trip to the Masai last fall.”  Whatever.  It stops becoming a discussion about photography and becomes all about their photography.  They don’t really care about my photography, they just care about showing me theirs.  It doesn’t work that way on our blogs, though.  And I appreciate that.

Kathy & I went to a wine dinner a few months ago at our favorite restaurant.  Wine dinners are an experience that we really enjoy, and involves a pairing of nice wines with foods prepared specially to match up with the wines.  Done well it is a culinary experience that is tough to beat.  At these dinners we are always seated at a table with 4-6 others, almost always couples.  The people are all very nice, but sometimes they know each other and Kathy & just sit there and listen, as they regale each other with tales of their most recent conquest, whether it is dinner at the French Laundry, their new boat or car, or their new 2,000 bottle wine room in their McMansion at the lake.

Eventually someone realizes that there are other people at the table (us) and decides to be polite and talk to us.  Sometimes they’ll ask us where we live, whether we’ve ever been to Napa or what our favorite wineries are.  And while it might appear that they are actually interested in what we do for a living or how old our kids are, it always seems to me to be an excuse to “pull out their iPhone” and talk about themselves.  I’m not completely sure, but I think that’s because people like to find out where you fall on their own personal hierarchy.  A lot of people have a need for that, and it brings them comfort to be able to rank and judge people based on their own scale of whatever it is that they value.

When I share my photographs on my blog, I never feel like someone is comparing my work to someone else’s, at least from the standpoint of whose work is better or who is a better photographer than someone else.  Because for many of us it’s about appreciating someone’s work for what it is, not trying to prove we are better than everyone else.

One of the things I find fascinating is the wide variety of subject matter and the range of equipment we use.  We have people shooting with the latest WhizBang Mark V, some using point & shoot cameras and others shooting with film.  And it’s all good.  Because what matters to us is not whether someone has the latest camera, but how they use the camera they have.

Whether a photograph was taken in someone’s back yard, Yosemite, Nova Scotia or Tuscany, what’s important is enjoying looking at photographs that show what someone sees and how they see it, not where they were when they took it or what camera they shot it with.  And we learn about that by sharing.  Sharing comments on someone else’s photographs and receiving comments on our own.