The Nature of Things

Ask my poor wife, I’m an annoying morning person. Yes, I wake up with a lot of energy and a mind that runs laps on Don Quixote’s personal treadmill. I have a sinking suspicion that most of my posts here will be made at the ass crack of dawn.

the camera points both ways

I was looking through my work recently and realized that I rarely shoot reportage or “reality” style. Even my “pretty picture” grand landscape images have a little something of me woven into the final image. I’m thinking this has to do with a concept that has vexed me since I was a kid; that you can never actually know the nature of anything (this applies to people too, but thankfully, I’ll stick to photography in this discussion). The only frame of reference you have arises from the walnut-looking mass of cells encased in your cranium. No, I’m not suggesting that reality doesn’t exist. What I am saying is that our perception of existence is severely limited, much to our chagrin.

the fabric of reality

As I write this, I am looking out the window and snow is softly falling. So what is reality here in terms of capturing it with a camera? How do we go about this if this is our purpose? For many, there’s some strange trust that a modern phone camera is “truth”. Point it at the scene and this becomes the “real scene”. Any deviation from this is “not what you saw”.

So let’s do a little exercise in viewpoint. Examine what is in focus and what isn’t. You quickly realize that you can focus on the window (and everything in the background becomes out of focus), you can focus on the snow falling (window becomes blurry and the background remains blurry) or you can focus on the background, in this case the forest. You can also follow one snowflake that falls from the top of the frame to the bottom. As you do this, the entire field goes blurry in some hazy dream-like postcard. So now that I’ve pointed this out, how do you represent reality (point of view and perception) as a photographer?

So what’s reality? If someone asked you “but is this what you saw?” now how would you answer?

is this what you saw?

I don’t have the bandwidth for this Bob, get to the point.

The point is that there are simultaneous realities that exist. For me, photography is an act of gratitude. I use the camera (a tool) to express the grand as well as the mundane. I try to find the grand in the mundane. I try to use the wonder and curiosity in me to sandblast off the varnish of contempt for the familiar.

It’s what keeps me going in times like these. Mix it up. Play. Allow for and hold different perspectives.

just a steel I-beam that i and countless others have walked by. is this what I saw? not until this moment

find calm in the chaos