Here’s a bit of wisdom I’d like to pass along: If you don’t want to do something, you have to say ‘no’.

A couple of months ago, I found myself added to a committee for a local ‘attraction’ which is attached (so to speak) to the municipal fine art museum.

Here is a partial description:

The Ware-Lyndon House is a circa 1840s late Greek Revival home with Italianate influence. It is the last remaining house in its once fashionable 19th century in-town neighborhood. The interior has been restored and arranged with decorative art and furnishings of the period.

This committee I’ve mentioned took on as a project the creation of an online database of a wide swath of those period furnishings and objets in the house.

Here’s where I enter the picture.  Since for a sustained 22 years of my 30-year ‘association’ with the local university my business card included the descriptor ‘photographer’, assumptions were made.

I did not say ‘no’.

I’ve set up a small studio in the house and am currently spending hour upon hour photographing the length and breadth of the contents, from chifforobes to dainty porcelain.  I’m killer at dainty porcelain, chifforobes not so much.

Truth is, I’m not suffering as much as implied.  My only paranoid ‘dismay’ is that in this iPhone world, people think photographs just happen: I sense a phantom bit of impatience from the other committee members.

Well, f*ck ‘em.  Oh, I don’t mean that.  Actually, yes, I do.