He Searched For The Perfect Shot (I think he got it)

The cover photo from Timm's 2002 "Silver Country" calendar. 

As I said in my last post, I’m running the 18th of the month an article on Timm written by an editor of The Silverton Appeal, where Timm worked as a reporter and photographer before signing up as a staffer to Congresswoman Darlene Hooley. The story goes into some background on his calendar project and  how he hoped that proceeds from it would help fund another humanitarian trip to South America with Project Helping Hands. There are a couple of adventures relayed by Timm in the article both show to what lengths he was willing to get a great picture – and how constitutionally unfit our accident-prone brother and son was for hazardous duty. It also shows how important his passion for photography was for his inner health. ("Beauty heals," indeed.) The photo that ran with the article is uncredited, but since Timm has his camera in the picture with him, I’m guessing it was taken by someone else. 

Also, I recently worked some on a poem for Timm I posted back in September 2008 that I’m reposting today.

Miss you more and more as time passes, brother …

In Search Of The Perfect Shot

Appeal photographer uses art to fund Third World mission trips

by Brenna Wiegand

The Silverton Appeal, Nov. 27, 2002

He took all the pictures for his new calendar within a 30-mile radius of Silverton. Now he’s hoping those photos will transport him into another world – the Third World.

Local photographer Timm O’Cobhthaigh’s Silver Country calendar showcases the beauty of the North Willamette Valley. The calendar is one of the ways O’Cobhthaigh (pronounced OH-kuh-vay) plans on continuing his work with the Keizer-based humanitarian aid organization, Project Helping Hands (PHH).

After a PHH trip to Boliva in August, O’Cobhthaigh vowed he wouldn’t let so much time elapse before his next trip. He’d done similar work before.

“I’ve never seen such poverty,” he said of his August adventure. Besides assisting the medical team, he documented the trip through his photographs, helping to publicize and gain support for the work.

O’Cobhthaigh got involved in photography during his school years, but after graduating with a degree in social work he got caught up in an all-consuming career in alcohol and drug counseling and prevention, he let go. 

It wasn’t until about four years ago, during a particularly stressful period, that O’Cobhthaigh again reached for a camera – this time almost as a lifeline. 

“I needed an outlet,” he said. “But instead of doing it casually I had to do it obsessively like everything else in my life.”

With each click of the shutter, O’Cobhthaigh realized that he was burned out on social work. Encouraged by the modest but regular sales of some photo greeting cards he’d placed in several locations around Salem, he said goodbye to his state job – and financial security – and looked to create a new pattern for his life. 

“There’s a lot of need, more than you can meet, and a lot of pain that you can be overwhelmed by,” he said of counseling work. 

He got a part-time job putting together the sports scores page for the Statesman Journal and started doing correspondent work for The Stayton Mail. In April 2000 he took a full-time reporter’s position at the Appeal Tribune. Eventually he landed photography contracts with The Oregon Garden, Oregon and Washington state parks and other groups and agencies.

Trying to develop his freelance photography business, O’Cobhthaigh now works part-time for the Appeal and The Stayton Mail. 

“I don’t like starving,” he said.

His passion for getting that special spot lands him in some strange spots …

“I hang out in weird places, often hoping not to get shot at or arrested,” he said. “I’ve fallen off mountains, like when trying to photograph eagles on Vancouver Island – I learned the importance of safety,”

A misstep sent him sliding down a rock face, barely coming to rest on a lip of rock overlooking the roiling Inland Passage below. 

“I looked over and there was the eagle just looking up at me, not more than 20 yards away,” he said. “I hadn’t been able to get that close to him all day.”

Of course he lives for sunrises and sunsets, and likes getting “quirky” shots of people and photographing hunter-jumper horse shows.

He’s bringing some of the social work back into his life, melding it with his passion for photography. A newfound balance is resulting. 

“I don’t want to play therapist or anything like that, but I enjoy this type of work,” he said. “The calendar is a way of enabling me to do more of it.”

He says time alone – waiting for the sun to come up or down – proves a good counterpoint to the more hectic aspects of his life. He hopes that solitude and serenity also comes through in the suitable-for-framing calendar shots that include a serene moon over Mt. Hood, an aerially-inspiring view of South Falls and Butte Creek Falls.

“I’m inspired by Winnie the Pooh and Pigliet and their ‘Thinking Spot,’” O’Cobhthaigh said.

He also has learned not to plan too closely when on photography trips.

“I’ve learned to let go of what I think I need to do today and take what comes,” he said. “Otherwise I might miss that great shot.”

He says he’s also realizing that it takes time to find a market. He hopes the calendar, funded through the initial investment of three friends, will become an annual publication, perhaps along with calendars of other areas or on other topics.

“I love the art; I love being out and traveling, and I’d love to have it underwrite my work with Project Helping Hands,” he said.

Founded in 1993, PHH takes groups into Bolivia, Costa Rica, Haiti, the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic, providing medical care and facilitating badly needed projects, such as providing water purification systems and basic shelter needs.

An image from a file of shots Timm apparently intended for a later calendar or book of photos.

SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH, SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH

Sept. 18, 2008

Lost brother, this morning the moon
is full and leans heavily toward your west,
spreading pale whiteness across my yard

and garden like a pall or spell. Or both:
A bittersweet thrall of light which holds
you and I together in its membrane,

in this silver womb we forever share.
Great loss has this silver lining, we know,
raining evanescent grace over us

exactly where we’re hurt the worst.
Serenely it plays that lonely guitar
you and I both loved and yearned for

in a Pat Matheny song we first heard
in the autumn of 1981 and both loved since,
a music now almost three decades

out there on the radio waves which sail
our dreams among the stars.
This moonlight’s on your mountain

where you stood surveying your past
wondering where you might go next;
this moonlight’s on the chapel

where your final footprints are dust,
weakly lamping the stone which
covers your face forever with

the three signs of passage --
a singing dolphin, a cross and
a stone gate, harrows all of heart.

Moonlight glows on stones everywhere
tonight with a lucent ache
which to us is utterly serene,

a greeting, perhaps, from the heart
we are forever seeking when we love,
when we pray, when we play that song.

You are so inside that music now
you may no longer know the ache I feel,
brother, the burden of the moon,

heavy with grief and so in love
with the beauty of the world you loved.
The fact of that ache is lost to you

now, brother, the augment of
history’s pain: but the peace
no longer haunts you like moonlight

silvering a dark garden
but is the element you are free in,
the heavenly third sea

we always dreamt of swimming  in,
the final trope of all poetry,
the kiss we always yearned for.

On this Sept. 15 I remember our song
and say that we compose its harmony
with our lives and complete it

only when we let go, singing
and sighing like that blue guitar
in that old Lyle Mays song,

becoming moons ourselves,
mirrors naked of all but that pure longing
in which our God now fullest glows,

sighting that dark shore ahead
we row toward together in a silent boat.
It’s a land no one sees or names or knows

except perhaps toward the end of songs,
the last strains like its approaching
silver surf. “September Fifteenth” is ending

in my ears like you, lost brother,
a steeple’s cross out there in the mere,
the moon that waxes when it disappears.

Lyle Mays, Bill Evans, Timm, me.