People at Work #8 : : Glassblower

What exactly is it that motivates us to take photos? It seems a simple question but I don't think the answer is simple. I'm sure most blippers spend a lot of time thinking about it. Here are a few reasons i do. I would love to hear what you might be thinking.

1) To notice things around me more. I love being on the lookout for the beautiful, the unusual, the quirky or the answer to a challenge.
2) To improve my photography and what I rather grandly call my 'artistic eye'. I take a lot of liberties with the definition of a photograph, both because I have a lot to learn about photography and because I think it's all part of the artistic process.
3) To chronicle my life, including my random thoughts and occasional rants. I have come to realize that the most mundane things can be interesting if enough time passes. My journals today are the equivalent of letters written by my grandparents in the days before the telephone, much less the internet. Not particularly earthshaking at the time they were written, but rather fascinating when read by me 100 years later. 
     My friend the historian says no letter is unimportant in the eyes of history. Some of my best writing has been about me. Not because I think I am particularly special but more as a way of understand and coming to terms with difficult issues that have been special to me. I'm not sure photographs can serve the same purpose,  It would be very difficult, but it's a goal. Will our descendants be looking at old email archives, or will they all have vanished into the either? Are we obliterating our own history when we press delete? We don't seem to press delete nearly as often on the photos….
4) As a challenge. It's never difficult to find plenty of things to photograph when on vacation, but when walking the dog in the same place for the hundredth time, can I still find a picture? I like to set little challenges for myself like taking an acceptable picture of something ugly, or finding a new way to photograph something I've done many times before.

We went to the Barlow today, an aggregation of old apple packing sheds that have been repurposed into an upscale aggregation of shops, restaurants, winery tasting rooms, even a distillery, a foundry and a glassblower.He was working in an open unimproved space cluttered with equipment including fans, cords, packing boxes and lots of unidentifiable objects randomly scattered. I'm not very good at taking or composing wide shots, but my ear was attracted by the popping sound as he turned on the burner, and my eye was caught by the flame as he put the tube with a blob go glass on the end into the flame and began blowing into a tube in his mouth. 

I like the trendy shops, but I love the opportunity to watch things being done as they have been done since time immemorial. This is not a very good photo either technically or compositionally, but it is a record of a disappearing art….