What do you see?
This is a photo I took in Africa. What do you see now?
Look at this next one….what do you see?
That’s a photo I took in Scotland. What do you see now?
Isn’t it interesting how we continuously look for and “recognise” patterns? How wherever we look we bring what we know to our experience of perception? I’m going to guess that, although it’s definitely not an exact match, in that first photo, you see Africa, and in that second one, you can see Scotland. I mean the shapes of those countries.
That’s certainly what I see. Of course, I bring something else too, to these photos, because in each case I was there. I stood in Africa and pointed my camera to the sky. However, I was taking a photo of trees. It was only afterwards that I thought – how like the shape of Africa! And I stood by the roadside on my way back south to Stirling from a holiday in Skye and thought what a lovely loch. Only later did I think, how like a map of Scotland!
Photos do that for me. They slow me down. They let my imagination kick in and then I SEE more and I EXPERIENCE more.
Photography is one of the tools I use to enrich my life.
Wow, that’s amazing. Bob, do you know John Daido Loori’s books? Your words really chime with his take on creativity. Both “The Zen of Creativity” and “Making Love with Light” (the latter is specifically on photography) talk a lot about this.