The Event

Sunday was overcast in Boise, and every so often a little rain would fall. Nothing particularly dramatic. Just one of those late-autumn days when the sky is gray, the air is cool, and the world seems to be getting ready for winter.

I went back to Kathryn Albertson Park with my camera, probably for the last time this year before the snow arrives.

There were a few dozen people wandering through the park. Mostly families, although there were a few people walking alone. Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry. Some were enjoying the last of the autumn colors, others were simply enjoying being outside.

And I suppose that's what I was doing, too.

The leaves have been changing for weeks, and now they're nearing the end of their season. The colors aren't quite what they were earlier in October. Some trees have already lost most of their leaves, and soon the rest will follow.

But I wanted to see it one more time before everything changes.

The Work

I brought my Nikon D500 and the 24–70mm f/2.8 lens I recently purchased.

I ended up leaving the aperture at f/2.8 for much of the afternoon. I didn't realize until later, when I was going through the photographs, just how much that shallow depth of field had affected the images.

Some things were sharp, while other things faded softly into the background. At first I wondered whether I'd done something wrong. But the more I looked at the photographs, the more I liked what had happened.

Not everything in a photograph has to be perfectly sharp. Sometimes what isn't in focus is just as important as what is.

There was another change in my photography this week. After years of using Adobe Lightroom, I finally canceled my subscription. I've moved entirely to RapidRAW, a newer photo editor that runs beautifully on Linux and gives me much of what I used Lightroom for without another expensive monthly bill.

I think we're beginning to see the end of some of these large subscription models, or at least the end of their dominance. Technology changes, alternatives appear, and eventually people discover they don't have to keep doing things the way they've always done them.

And maybe that applies to more than software.

Dating apps come to mind. I've never had much luck with them, and I don't personally know anyone who's found what they were looking for through one. I find that a little comical, in a strange way. So many single people have spent years doing essentially the same thing, hoping that eventually the same process would produce a different result.

Maybe the answer was never to keep doing the same thing that everyone else was doing.

Maybe the answer was to change the landscapes I allowed myself to walk through.

The Images

I've been thinking about change a lot lately.

The year is coming to an end. The leaves are coming to the end of their season. Technology that once seemed indispensable is being replaced by something new. Even the ways we meet people, form relationships, and spend our time are changing.

We tend to think of endings as losses. And sometimes they are.

But there is something reassuring about watching the seasons change. The trees don't struggle to hold on to their leaves forever. They let them go. Winter comes, the landscape becomes quiet, and for a while it can seem as though everything beautiful has disappeared.

But it hasn't.

The colors will return. They always do.

And perhaps that's why we need all the seasons. We need the good dates and the bad ones. We need the things that work and the things that don't. We need the old technology that served us well, and the new ideas that eventually make it possible to leave the old behind.

We need to be willing to change, even when we don't know exactly what comes next.

Janis Joplin once described singing onstage as being like "dancing with God for two hours."

I've always liked that thought.

But walking through Kathryn Albertson Park on a gray Sunday afternoon, watching the last leaves fall while families wandered along the pathways, I wondered whether the dance was something bigger than those two hours onstage.

Maybe it's all of it.

The good dates and the bad dates. The people who come into our lives and the people who leave. The mistakes we make, the things we learn, the photographs that turn out differently than we expected, and the moments when we finally decide to do something differently.

Maybe life itself, with all its changes, is the dance.

And maybe the trick isn't to learn how to stop everything from changing.

Maybe it's to learn how to dance along with it.