2 August 2010 — Podcast #0645

Jury Duty! Hoorah!

Audio version (3:05)

Let me read from this lovely document that I just received in the mail. "It's official," it says stamped all over it. "Official Document. Your name has been randomly selected from information submitted by the Department of Licensing and the Skagit County Auditor. You are hereby ordered to report for jury service for a two-week period."

Oh goodie. I'm actually excited about this. You want to know why? It gives me two weeks that I can't do any keywording in Lightroom which is the only thing that I can think of that is less fun than jury duty.

I know. We're all supposed to do keywording. It is this great thing that is going to allow us to find our negatives and do all kinds of searching. It's a virtue; I know it's a virtue. For some reason I just find it incredibly tedious to do keywording in Lightroom. I do it, but I don't enjoy it. It reminds me of washing the trays and the glassware and all of that stuff that I used to do in the wet darkroom. It's the least interesting part of my creative life.

But you know, I discipline myself to do it anyway because I inherently know that a certain part of any creative process is going to involve things that you don't want to do, things that you find are just tedious and boring and painful and it's the way of life. I suppose if what we're looking for in life is something that has no tedium in it whatsoever as our creative outlet, we're probably never going to find it. Painters have to wash brushes, musicians have to practice the scales, and it goes on and on.

So why, as photographers, would we have it any different than any other artistic pursuit? There are these things — for me it's keywording — that are just no fun but they are part of the process.

But at least — wowee — I can postpone it for two weeks while I attend jury duty. After all, the idea of keywording and doing jury duty is too much suffering for any one person to endure simultaneously.

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