Kelsh Family is Moving!

We’ve talked about doing it for years and we’re finally taking the leap.

The Kelsh family is moving to the Catskills in New York. The boys started school in Delhi, New York this week. Yes, that’s right, past tense, as in Wednesday.. This is a big deal for us and has been brewing for a long time.

There are all kinds of reasons we’re moving not the least of which is that this is among the more beautiful places on the continent. It does all of our hearts good just to drive down these country roads.

Anne grew up here and has always wanted to come back to live. I’ve fallen in love with this place over the couple of decades we’ve been married. Anne’s mother and a couple of her sisters still live here and we love them all and for the most part they love us/me back.

That’s not to say that uprooting two young boys and putting them in a new school is not without its problems. Let’s just say that one of them is thrilled and one of them is less than thrilled. In the interest of teenage privacy I won’t name names, but it’s been a difficult month. Among the worst, actually.

And the next couple of months will probably be crazier. We need to get everything out of our house in Philadelphia, sell it, and start our new lives. I haven’t slept past 2:30 AM for several weeks now.

At the end of the tunnel, however, is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a photographer and become immersed in the natural world. All four seasons are on spectacular display here. On a clear moonless night you can almost reach up and grab the Milky Way.

I look back on the time when I did my nature book, Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder as one of the happiest times in my life. I need to spend more time alone in the woods with my cameras and there are plenty of woods here. I just can’t wait.

When someone up here expresses concern that I won’t be able to handle the colder winters, I just play the former Fargo Forum paper boy card and it seems to shut them up fairly quickly. (35° below zero. 5 AM. 120 papers. You had to put all of them in the front door.) The dull earth tones of winter that transform the landscape into a world of browns and grays and whites are possibly my favorite subject here.

To say that we are overwhelmed is almost a comical understatement. The secret of our success here may just be to keep a smile on our faces and laugh when the tidal waves hit.

For example, last Thursday night, instead of going home to prep the house for moving I went to the emergency room with all of the symptoms of a blood clot just below my recent knee replacement…a little worrisome.

They made me prop my leg up and stay out of automobiles for the weekend as Anne and the boys drove the four hours back to Philadelphia to deal with everything that needs dealing with. Long story, but after an ultrasound it was determined that there was some kind of mysterious interior bruising but no blood clot. I just did not see that one coming. (I did however watch several great movies with my mother-in-law as my family was packing boxes.)

Like I said, the next couple of months are going to be crazy. I’m going to do my best to keep up with the Fan Photo of the Day on Facebook and other projects but there may be some gaps—like there have been in the past month. I’m just going to have to give myself some slack here. I hope you understand.

And of course we need to stay in business. We still plan to offer our courses and webinars and also create new ways to present and inspire you to shoot glorious images of whatever in the world you love the most.