The Fog of Transition
In both photography and writing, you cannot parachute straight from the fast-paced, analytical noise of everyday life into the deep, emotional reality of a story or a landscape and expect immediate clarity.
If you try to force a chapter or raise the camera the second you sit down or step outside, your perspective “fogs.” You end up capturing your own preconceptions, rushed energy, or leftover distractions rather than the truth of the subject.
I receive this annual gentle reminder the moment I step from an air-conditioned house into the humid St. Augustine morning. The glass can’t handle the sudden temperature shift. The image is lost before I’ve even composed it. This is the time of year when the camera gear moves into the garage—so it can acclimate and be ready when I need it.
The same thing happens to the mind.
The Creative “Garage”
The garage is your transition zone. It’s the required, unglamorous chunk of time where you aren’t actively producing yet, but you are actively adjusting.
In photography, this is walking the location without raising the camera to your eye. It’s feeling the heat radiating off the coquina, watching how the light cuts through the Spanish moss, noticing the way the tide is pulling the light across the sand. You have to become part of the scene before you can accurately document it.
In writing, this is the phase of reading over yesterday’s pages, reviewing research notes, or simply sitting quietly with the tone of the chapter. You're letting your brain warm up to the “temperature” of the narrative so that when you finally start typing, the prose isn’t clouded by the mundane tasks you just finished.
Condensation naturally evaporates once the glass matches the ambient air. Similarly, the friction of the creative process vanishes once your mindset aligns with your subject. You aren’t forcing the story or the image anymore; you are simply an unobstructed channel for it to pass through.
The Clear Lens
That quiet time your gear spends sitting on a shelf in the garage isn’t wasted time—it’s the physical boundary that makes the art possible. The same applies to the transitional moments you take before you write your first word or take your first exposure.
In a world that rewards speed and constant output, this deliberate pause feels almost radical. But it's the discipline that separates work that merely looks good from work that feels true.
Whether I’m staging my camera before a sunrise over the Matanzas or settling into the emotional temperature of a new chapter, the principle is the same: respect the transition. Let the lens (and the mind) acclimate. Only then can the work emerge without distortion.
This is the quiet secret behind every photograph I offer and every story I tell.