Today’s Post by Joe Farace
When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.—Confucius
On April 14th National Reach as High as You Can Day encourages us to evaluate our goals and do our best to reach them.
We can define “reach” in many ways. If you search for “photography” in the Guinness Book of World Records, you’ll find that Dr Tim Laman was the first person to photograph every bird of paradise species. His lavishly illustrated book. along with with Edwin Scholes, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds contains many of his spectacular images.
Now photographing birds of any kind is, I think, the most challenging photographic specialty and requires knowledge of bird behavior and the technical and esthetic abilities to produce the great-looking images that Dr. Laman displays in his book. But we can reach for our goals in other ways that maybe better fits our abilities and at least somewhat challenges out skills, otherwise what’s the point? Why not reach for the stars or the sky or maybe a balloon floating away from us much like the one that carried the Wizard of Oz away from Dorothy.
Other Ways to Reach Higher
While this day may not be about setting records, it is certainly about reaching higher than we think we can. Out here in the real world, we sometimes become complacent. National Reach as High as You Can Day is just a reminder to not to let your dreams go adrift. Reach for them. Reach as high as you can!
HOW TO OBSERVE #ReachAsHighAsYouCanDay
- Share your goals.
- Create new goals.
- Dream about you goals
How I Made this Photo: The featured image today was shot on a 4×5 Calumet view camera with the legendary Schneider 90mm f/6.8 Super-Angulon Lens on Kodak Tri-X film, exposure unrecorded but that’s a story for another day…
What are my personal goals on this day? I have several, especially as they relate to film photography:
- Medium format photography, Start by being healthy and strong enough to shoot the The Fujifilm GA645W Professional that Matt Staver has loaned me with some forbearance and not asking it back before
- New films. Over the winter I have acquired many new and different film emulsions from Lomography, Rollei and others I want to try shooting as many new 35mm film emulsions as I can for the rest of the year.
- My 2024 goal is to have 200 (or more) subscribers to my YouTube channel—Joe Farace’s Videos—by the end of the year. Right now, it’s up to 164 and I haven;t been able to shoot any new videos for a while but I promise to do so real soon now. If you would like to help, subscribe. It’s free. And I’ll have a nice prize package giveaway, exclusively for YouTube subscribers, when that happens.