A Photographer's Field Notes
Three frames from a long walk through the hills last week.
I walked the same hill I always walk, but with the long lens this time, looking for things I had stopped seeing.
The light was thin and grey when I started, and turned slowly gold over the next two hours. I came back with about forty frames. Three of them feel worth keeping.
The first one is the road itself. I have walked it hundreds of times and never once stopped to photograph it. I think I had assumed it was too ordinary to be worth a frame, which is exactly the kind of thinking the long lens cures you of.
The second one was a surprise — a small grove of cherry trees on the southern slope I had never noticed. They were already past their best, but the petals on the ground made up for it.
The third one is the light through the trees, which is the photograph I had walked out to take in the first place, and which I almost missed because I had been distracted by the first two.
A photograph is not what you point the camera at. It is what you finally noticed after years of pointing the camera in roughly the right direction.