Heroes Not Zombies

This isn’t what I usually do, but here’s the photo I posted yesterday. I wanted to show you it again to say something about using a camera.

I carry a camera everywhere, and these days many, many of you have cameras in your smartphones so you too will be carrying a camera everywhere too. I’ve heard some people say if you are looking through a lens you aren’t experiencing reality as it is. In other words if you are busy photographing what you are looking at, then you aren’t really seeing what there is to see.

That’s not my experience at all. Of course, I don’t walk around with the camera in front of my face. I look, I see, I notice, and then I photograph.

But what surprises me, and delights me, time and time again, is how once I get the photos loaded up onto my iMac and look at them on the big screen, I see things I really wasn’t aware of seeing at the time.

In the case of this photo, I noticed the bird on the stone when I was trying to photograph the reflection of the forest and the stone in the river, but by the time I focused the shot and pressed the shutter button, the bird had flown off. I thought I’d missed it.

But look! I didn’t miss it, and even better, even more amazing, you can see the reflection of the bird in the water as it flies off over the river!

Wonderful! And I really didn’t see that when I was in the forest.