Austin-based food photographer Penny De Los Santos has traveled extensively throughout the United States and to more than 30 foreign countries shooting assignments for National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur Magazine and others. Yet she has advice for those who think you must travel far away to find interesting stories:
“There are great stories in your backyard.”
Penny De Los Santos
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Which explains why she has covered food trailers in Austin as she writes about on this blog post.
Finding stories in your own backyard has been a recurring theme of this blog over the years because it’s so easy to be seduced into thinking that great stories can only be found in far away and distance places. Penny’s quote made me literally think of my own backyard. A couple weeks ago I found some twigs on my back porch and I wondered how they got there. Then one morning almost magically there was a nest sitting neatly on a rafter above our back door.
A week or so later we saw a robin sitting in the nest. We’ve stopped using the back door so not to disturb the bird from laying her eggs. I’m not saying it’s a story worthy of a feature film (or even a You Tube video), but it is an unfolding drama that I’ve never witnessed before in my own backyard. Any day now I expect to get glimpses of little chirping baby birds just two feet from our back door.
P.S. Speaking of backyards, the movie that first comes to mind is Hitchcock’s Rear Window (the Oscar-nominated script written by John Michael Hayes based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich). What other films took place in—loosely speaking—in backyards?
[…] Austin-based food photographer Penny De Los Santos has traveled extensively throughout the United States and to more than 30 foreign countries shooting assignments for National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur Magazine and others. Yet she has advice for those who think you must travel far away to find interesting stories: “There are great stories in […] Original Source… […]