Take Your Camera Outside

On one line, the other rang, a message left, a call returned, with the added bonus: take your camera outside.  Hurry.

Ending the other call, I grabbed my cell (turned off) with camera in one hand, house phone in the other, and scurried outside, hitting the cell on button with the one hand, dialing back the friend with the other as I scooted outside, impatiently telling the cell (which takes forever in this time of instant access) to hurry up and come on, as my friend answered her phone.

Where is it? I ask.

Sorry.  It’s gone.  You missed it.  The setting sun lit up the whole sky.

There were traces of glory.  Bits and pieces, leftovers on the table of God’s sky.  Clouds and light of the sun from behind the mountains bidding its quiet farewell for the night.

I felt not impoverished but enriched for it having been there.

Sure trees make noise whether I’m there to hear them or not.

And sunsets leave fingerprints whether my eyes behold them or not.

And it is glory abounding.

In the Frame

Local librarian and FB friend Tomi posted two pictures of sunset (or was it sunrise?  sometimes it’s hard to tell), one zoomed out, the other closer in, of the same scene – the Highlands in the quietude of day’s end (or beginning), mists clinging even as they dance and shift.

Tomi’s own take on the contrast between the two pictures is that the wider perspective includes more color and less drama.

My own response is to think that perspective makes all the difference in life as well as in the photographic images we create.

It’s the same scene, but our focus changes everything, so that the fallen tree trunk in the foreground of Tomi’s photographs takes on mystery or sorrow or loss or ominous threat or curiosity in close-up, but disappears into a morass of other details blurred from a distance.

Both vantages are in the frame.

Both are true . . . simultaneously.

A tree fell in the field one day and for some time and some time yet to come, there it lay, and will, always in the frame, but seldom remarked upon.  Does it need noticing in order to be?  No.  But in the noticing, something changes in me.


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Photos by Tomi Herold

Sunset, Sunrise

Sunrise

Sunset

In the still 

time lapse

of the digitized 

moment

how can you tell

the difference?

If you can’t tell

from the geography

clues

then you couldn’t

could you?

Does that mean

that every sunset is

in some way

a sunrise . . . 

just depending

on how

you’re looking

at it . . .

where you're standing. . . 

how your head is tilted?