Yeah, it’s crude and immature, but I take such delight in the opportunities for public shaming as a result of having had the wherewithal to capture a pic of this nasty freeloading lowlife who ripped me off at the bar the other night:
phildo has written 3 entries about this goal
Shots I'm still aching to capture
4 years ago
So lately I’ve been pretty happy taking assloads of pictures (and hella committed to keeping my camera on me at all times), but there’re still a few that evade me, namely:
- cloud-to-ground lightning strikes
- a tornado
- more human drama/conflict candids
- better lunar shots
- better aurora shots
My Father's Camera
4 years ago
Some cliches are so painfully true: you only regret the shots you didn’t take. I’m so delighted and honored that my father is letting me borrow his Nikkormat FT3, and it just gives me chills every time I pick it up and feel the heft of the body and the wonderful tactile feedback of pushing and pulling the mechanical aperture and shutter speed settings, feeling it click into place, and the magical moment of the mirror flipping up and that shutter clicking… Whoa. That’s a whole ‘nother entry about the joy of old SLR’s…
Anyhow, I was driving back to Madison yesterday after visiting home for Mother’s Day. There’s this stretch of two-lane country highway I take in Central Wisconsin before getting on the freeway. I’ve never really thought twice about that highway – normally it’s just that godawful podunk stretch of country desolation that I could probably drive blindfolded after all these years of taking it. But having that beautiful hunk of steel with a lens attached sitting next to me, I was probably a hazard to other drivers but I didn’t care as I kept scanning and composing shots in my head that I’d never even thought about in all my years of driving that stretch.
To top it all, I had left home at that perfect time of day with glowing golden late-afternoon sunlight kissing everything it touched, AND there was a gorgeous, menacing black storm retreating in the east. I’m almost crying now thinking about it, that I missed freezing that moment in time. As I kept driving down the road, the scenes around me kept getting progressively more enchanting – a lone, aging silo nearly swallowed up by trees; one forlorn cow moping near the corner of a fence; and finally, there is one moment in time, one angle of approach, one image frozen in my mind that I feel simultaneously tortured and blessed to have passed.
Off to the right of this highway, there was a gently rolling field of green, just in those early stages of a dandelion invasion. Little springtime highlights sprinkled throughout this field, and a little gravel path meandering through it to this seemingly abandoned storage shed. Its slightly rusted steel was brilliantly lit up by the sun behind me, almost exploding in contrast to the roiling black sky behind it. Framing this unknown structure were two, maybe three trees just beginning to bud; white flowers where leaves would soon be, they seemed almost to be snow-covered despite their obviously springtime green and golden surroundings. These too stood in golden sunlit contrast to the black skies behind them, almost unnaturally as if there were already an infrared filter in place.
And I passed it up. Another (true) cliche: words do it no justice now. I don’t know why. My mind was completely in compose and shoot mode, my eyes thirsty for the ordinary oozing drama like that scene. As I sped down that highway, my heart ached with each turn of the wheels as I sped further and further from that angle in space and that moment in time. I tried explaining to myself that I had to get back to Madison for a meeting at 8, or that the car behind me was following so closely I couldn’t just hit the brakes and pull over, or that traffic was so heavy on 10 that day that it wouldn’t be safe for me on the side of the road. Maybe the reasoning I tried to cling to the most, yet most intuitively knew to be hollow, was that “there will be another time, another day, another chance.”
And that was when I realized why certain cliches are true; a moment of photography-inspired enlightenment slapped me upside the head, a zen moment of understanding how this camera, that moment, and my decisions scale up into how I live my life.
A little while down the road, it finally got to be too much for me, and I pulled off onto a side road to shoot what I could before the canvas of that storm or the highlighting from the sun behind me disappeared. I shot what I could and tried my best to capture the beauty currently before me rather than mourn what I’d missed. That challenge, too, was an obvious metaphor for the way I view the passage of my life.
Even now as I write this I’m grateful for the shots I did take; my timing in retrospect was fortuitous – 5 minutes later the landscape turned gray and flat and I was lucky to have gotten what I could. Maybe this is my father’s way of teaching me the fine line between regret and acceptance.
