A thousand words

I never used to be much of a photographer.  Never much appealed to me.  For one thing, my glasses and the viewfinder never seemed to play well together.  For another, the whole process seemed complicated-- buying film, managing to get it into the camera without exposing it, then having to finish a certain number of pictures before you could take the film in to be developed.  I can recall time after time when I picked up a set of prints only to find that ninety percent of them were either badly composed or fuzzy—and yet here I had a whole set of ugly, fuzzy prints that I had a hard time throwing away because, after all, I’d taken them. 

And then there was protecting your film from the X-ray machines when you flew, and figuring out what to do with the negatives and . . . you get the idea. 

But maybe the biggest barrier to my enjoying photography was that I never seemed to get any better.  By the time I got my many badly composed, badly focused pictures and my few relative masterpieces, I had no idea what I’d done wrong on the bad pictures or right on the good ones.  Maybe I should have taken a class or two, but why, when I seemed to have absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for camera work.

Then digital cameras came along, and I got one, just to play around with, and now I’m hooked.  And I’ve finally realized . . . I wasn’t a bad photographer.  I just hadn’t found the right equipment yet.

And along with my digital camera, I discovered a new creative outlet.  Taking pictures is so completely nonverbal that it makes the perfect balance for a work life spent, for the most part, hunched over a computer, courting backache, eyestrain and carpal tunnel and pushing all the verbal centers of the brain as hard as they can go. 

One great fringe benefit of spending time with my camera is that even though the verbal part of my brain can shut down and rest while I’m taking pictures, some part of my consciousness continues to gnaw on any creative dilemmas I’ve been struggling with. And more often than not, when I get back to the computer, either I’ve solved whatever writing problem had me beating my head against the wall—or at least I’ve returned with new energy and a new sense of optimism that it can be solved.

So in celebration of the part of my creative brain that doesn’t get out in public as often as my writing does, I’ve posted a few of my favorite recent photos.