9:45am Villa #6 / Ajijic 64°
Today is writing circle except it started raining a few hours ago, thunder and lightening and then a steady downpour afterword. It just stopped but it's too cool and damp to sit on the terrace where we write at the Lake Chapala Society. I don't have to go every week, I can go every other week if I want. I always enjoy it and am endlessly amazed at the writing that comes out of me in that setting. I've only been three times so far and each time I get a piece that I'm happy to read and share. The first two were about Stephen and what happened to him and to me afterword but last week I got a good, positive one about photography. I should type it out here just to see how long it takes to type one up.
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The prompt: Imagine looking at something very small ... then see it large and enter that landscape. Where are you?
Things looks very different depending on where you are in the picture. A bug on a flower petal, no bigger than the head of a pin, has a very different view of the world than I do while I observe him. How, I often wonder, did the bug get there? Where did it come from? Why that flower in that location? Is it the same random chance that we meet, as random as passing a stranger on the street? If I wasn't looking so closely, I would never have seen that bug and by the same token, I pass people on the street without seeing them either. What am I missing?
These are the things I ponder as a photographer. I feel like I don't really see anything until I have my camera in my hand. I can't explain how my perceptions shift, almost like I have a special film that comes over my eyes that alters and enhances the light on things. Photography is all about light but it's also all about the willingness to look at the world at the world deeply, drink in every detail, shadow, leaf and reflection.
Life is a lake and the camera is a diving board.
I've played with cameras all my life but didn't get a digital camera until 2011. By the next summer, I had saved up enough money to buy a big girl camera, a Canon Rebel T3, and that same year I planted sunflowers all over my yard for the first time. As they grew, I learned about my camera, experimenting with settings and then uploading the shots into my laptop. I found an editing program online, one that was free and easy to use, and I began to learn how to alter my shots. My mother had died that year in May and having a whole new world of photography to step into was a soothing balm to my grief.
The fun really started when the sunflower blooms began to open up. 21 of the seeds I had planted grew and my front yard became a wonderland of 6 to 10 foot tall sunflowers with heads the size of platters. I went out to photograph them at all hours of the day --- I got morning light with hazy skies, afternoons hot with intense blue skies, and evenings just before sunset, the sun setting through the huge petals and leaves.
And the insects! Turns out that sunflowers need insects to unlock the secrets hidden in their cores. The winged creatures perform a sort of worship service, an ecstatic dance on the face of the flower, around and around starting at the outer edges, working their way into the center. And when they are finished, the look of the sunflower has been transformed as the spiral weaving now become seeds.
The sunflower takes two months to grow from seed to to mature plant. Two crops in a season can be grown easily or even three, as I proved the following year. I had sunflowers growing from April through October that year and I never tired of the process, watching them as they lived their lives through the lens of my camera.
It's been a few years now and I don't take my camera out as often as I did. Seems like that world through the lens was a way to leave my world, the one in my head, and step into Wonderland. Just like Alice found, the trip was confusing and colorful and the ponderings that I came away with took me deeper into life in a way I never imagined. Photography taught me how to see, how to alter reality through editing and choose where to focus my eye. Go ask Alice when she was just small.
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OK, that's it. 629 words in about 40 minutes straight at writing circle. Now that I've got it captured onto the the computer, I can see where it could be improved and expanded. That kind of writing has value and I should plan to go at least twice a month.
The sun came out at 10:10, just as the circle began their writing. Dang. I guess I'm being told not to let the weather fool me, just go anyway next time. And so I shall. But at least I've been productive this morning and got this piece copied.
That's it for today. Good job!
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