About Still Stories
I wasn’t always slow.
For decades I treated life like a run-and-gun film set. Dawn meant a tripod on some windswept ridge; noon meant a corporate boardroom portrait; midnight meant editing tracks for a narration due at sunrise that I'd recorded the previous afternoon. Photography was my compass, but audio paid the bills: morning-drive promos, narration gigs, multimedia soundtracks for everyone from GTE to Mary Kay to Xerox. In between, I learned to be my own graphic-design department — logos here, brochures there — teaching myself kerning and color profiles on the fly.
It looked nimble on a résumé. In practice it was breathless. Two marriages rose and crashed in that slipstream. Then came a throat-cancer surgery that stitched shut whatever illusion of “limitless hustle” I’d been coasting on. While relearning how to speak without pain and healing from an 8-inch scar down and around my neck, I slowed to literal walking speed — camera in hand, roaming Dallas’s Swiss Avenue one front porch at a time.
Those unhurried loops reset my shutter. The frames that stayed with me weren’t the sweeping vistas or the ad-ready headshots; they were smaller: a lone shutter creaking in West-Texas wind, a roadside memorial glowing in passing headlights, a world-class athlete bowing his head in thanks, a boy’s matter-of-fact joy beneath a Fourth-of-July fountain. I realized most of my favorite photographs — landscapes, portraits, oddball event moments — had been shot for no one but me. They simply carried weight, and the weight deserved words.
That realization sparked Still Stories. Each post begins with one image — sometimes more, sometimes fresh, sometimes rescued from a dusty negative sleeve from the days before digital — and expands into the full memory it contains: smells, textures, stray dialogue, the split-second instinct that pressed the shutter. No gear chatter, no algorithm bait. Some nights you’ll get a single frame; other entries braid two or three, more when the narrative demands it. Always at a pace that lets you breathe.
Why trust me to slow things down? Because I’ve lived the opposite: 3 hour voiceover sessions, deadlines tighter than piano wire, rush-job comps hand-delivered minutes before press time. I know what overstimulation sounds like through studio monitors — and I know the relief of listening to live oak leaves rustle against a tripod leg.
If your days feel overscrolled and underlived, you’re among friends here. Linger over an image, follow the story where it wanders, and see what surfaces once the noise subsides.
I’m Lawrence. I once chased every frequency at once. Now I tune for stillness. Thanks for stepping into the quiet with me — let’s let the reel roll at its own unhurried speed.
— Lawrence Standifer Stevens
