Seeing It's Not Ordinary

If I learned anything today, it's that there is complex beauty in the ordinary things around me. It sure is easy to overlook them, though, if I take the same route, walk at the same pace and believe that other places far away are more interesting.

On my walk today, I paused and looked at a little scuff of blue paint on the weathered wood, a wrinkle in the glass of the old house on the corner that reflects light in such a curious way. I had to ask:  What am I really seeing? The more persistent question became:  What have I been overlooking?

I had to walk backwards, bend over, crouch down, squint my eyes. I looked from different angles than I usually do. I found it created a sort of visual warp through which I could enter, a way to exist differently, if only through my eyes.

It's funny I think that leaves are green or that flowers are soft and delicate, that glass is flat or that the the sky is blue. Seems like the natural world has all kinds of ways of showing me that it's anything but ordinary.

My iPhone 1G Camera Retires

In the wilderness of the urban world, I've been carrying my iPhone 1G to photograph what I see.  It's the original first-generation iPhone I bought when they first came out.  It only has 4 GB, and I've never maxed out the memory, probably because I don't use videos a lot on it.

What's interesting about using a very simple camera like this all the time is:  Its restricted technology makes me deal almost solely with composition.  You cannot rely on tricky features of the camera to get your image right.  No flash, no zoom, no macro focus, just compose and shoot.  I sometimes get a little cranky with the limits it places on focusing sharply and controlling things about it that other cameras can do, but I think that overall I've learned more about what I'm looking at and thinking about why I'm shooting the picture instead of what the camera can do.  I have learned to shoot quickly and pay attention to light that's available to me.  Also, I have to hold very still (reiterating the very first thing I learned in photography).

Now that's about to change a bit.  I'm finally upgrading to a 4G (fourth generation) phone/camera.  It's the same size as the 1G that I have been using.  But now I will have a reversible lens (shoots at me or at you without turning the phone around), more megapixels per file (image), a flash, selective focus and some zooming ability.  Immediately, it makes me think more about the camera than I did before.  It will be that way until it, too, becomes second nature to use, but I don't think it will take long.  Apple makes very intuitive products, and the camera on their phone is designed to be a tool to use and not an implement that introduces frustration like so many other cameras tend to be.

I'm posting a few images here from the last couple of days.  Kind of a tribute to the little iPhone 1G I've carried with me, a trusty tool I've grown to respect and admire.  As I've stated before, probably 90% of my images on this blog are from that iPhone.

Art as Ephemeral Bubble

Everything changes all the time, even art, especially for the artist.

I was thinking about Edward Weston who photographed bell peppers with an idea about sensuality in mind.  In the final black-and-white form, they are some of the most seductive and curvaceous figures ever imagined.  They suggest tenderness, resignation, vitality, submission, and many other things to other people.  That they are capable of suggesting ideas is the art of his work.

When I was first learning about photography back in the day, Mr. Weston's images were interesting on a technical level to me because they were simple objects with interesting textures and lighting.  I was not sophisticated at all.  Back then, as a novice shutterbug, I took a picture of something and moved on to the next thing, did not understand iconic imagery or metaphor or other intellectualizations of shape and form.

I had heard about artists creating multiple images of one subject, but I didn't then realize what it meant to be in pursuit of an idea through image making.  I joked about being in my fencepost period or my apple period and didn't understand transcendence as an artistic pursuit.  Few teenagers do.

But now, as a novice writer in a different phase of life, one who wishes to express some exact concept or idea, I can relate to the images made by Weston.  The idea's inception is instantaneous, but the execution of the idea takes forever sometimes.  It seems always elusive, always tantalizing, sometimes discouraging but still fascinating.

Producing a beautiful bell pepper - one that becomes something much more than a bell pepper - an image suggestive of a curving female form is quite a feat, as is writing intense passion or playing love through music or dancing jealousy on stage.  Those concepts are variable and hard to define, almost impossible to pin down for more than a moment.  They are ephemeral, like a bubble that lands on your fingertip and then bursts.  But that quality of being delicate and exquisite is what makes it so satisfying to come close to attainment, always realizing that perfection is impossible in the end.  

Two Exposures: Charles Cramer and Me

There were two times when I encountered a camera for the very first time, and then there was a third.  

I stood looking down at my hands and what was in them, in the middle of a morning, outdoors on our gopher-ruined lawn.  I realized I had a Kodak Brownie camera with film inside of it, loaned from one of my parents.  I looked through the viewfinder and everything changed; the world had become two dimensional and was contained within a small frame.  

The Brownie, essentially a pinhole camera allowing very little control to the photographer, had a button to push to take a picture, a viewfinder screen to look at with one eye and a crank to forward the film.  That was pretty much it.  You don't need much else as a kid, really.  You just need to look at things and see them, and then keep looking and seeing as you decide what to capture - or stop - on film.  

I took a roll, about 12 pictures, and they came back to me in a week or so in an envelope handed to me on another morning.  I scrutinized them one by one and then again, peering at them and seeing what the camera had done with the light, the shapes and the colors.  Most things were fuzzy, as if Vasoline had been smeared on the cheap little lens, and it could have been scratched and abused by the time I got my hands on it.  

We lived in a rural area, and I spent a lot of time outdoors, so the camera that day served as a catalyst for my eye to begin looking around at my surroundings, my home, my cats, my family.  It was as though I came more into focus rather than what I was looking at because I had to examine colors and patterns deliberately for the first time.  I was about 10 years old, perhaps younger, and I only used the camera one or two other times, but I put all the pictures into an album I still have.  

Fast forward about six years, maybe seven.  In high school, a small single-lens reflex camera was put into my hands, again without asking for it.  It felt like it just landed there, and I was told, "There's a roll of film in there.  Go take some pictures."  Pretty simple.  I was given the most rudimentary instructions and was sent away.  I walked again as if I was seeing the places around me for the first time and spent a good hour or more walking around the school and nearby wooded neighborhood looking at things, shooting the roll.  

I came back to the classroom, handed over the camera, went home.  The next day, the roll was developed and hanging by a small clip on a line strung across the classroom, a graphic arts room.  I was taken into the darkroom and, for the first time, saw a contact print being made.  When it was dry, I scrutinized every little 35 mm print meticulously, seeing in two-dimensional black and white what I'd always barely noticed in color.  

In those two encounters, I was triggered, permanently exposed, if you will, to photography.  It was a perfect storm of naive youth, creative mind and access to information all converging in a potent mix in which I was completely and immediately immersed.  This technology called photography was completely mine almost within the blink of an eye.  One minute, it seemed, I was a young schoolgirl minding my own business and the next I was practically inhaling chemicals, caressing cameras, fondling film and going entirely insane about every possible aspect of photography that I could absorb.  I was handed books and read all of them, memorizing every page, consuming them like drugs.  This was love, deep and undeniable.  I found it seriously amusing at times to see myself constantly using my viewfinder to see the world.  But, on the other hand, I was infatuated with creating images, manipulating light, understanding focal planes and exposure times.  

The third camera was my own Canon FTb SLR that I bought with money I'd saved for a few years, a camera I still have now.  There has never been another tool that felt quite so perfect in my hands, and no other implement for creativity has ever been quite as exciting as my Canon was and has been to me.  

I saw and understood light, learned the zone system Ansel Adams had figured out, tried out filters and a new lens.  Then, unfortunately, I began to feel frustrated by the mismatch between what I saw and imagined and what I could produce in the school darkroom.  I cleaned it meticulously, spent hours and hours in its dark confines trying to make great prints but did not progress beyond a certain point.  The enlargers were sturdy and fine for beginners as were the storage and mixing containers for chemicals, but lots of kids were using the space.  Spills, dents and dings took their toll on equipment, so prints were good enough but no better.  

What I didn't know - still being pretty naive really - was the severe lack of funding for the graphic arts classroom and the high cost of the materials I really needed.  The instructor provided as much for interested students as he could, but eventually the material and space limited my progress.  Then I graduated and put my camera aside more and more often until I was without it much more often than I carried it.  

I tried building my own darkroom in a spare closet at our house, probably one of the smallest darkrooms ever used, but it fed my interest for a while.  I eventually lost interest in maintaining the darkroom, moved away and never rebuilt another, and my intense interest gradually dissipated.  

I went to a presentation and exhibition opening for a fine nature photographer named Charles Cramer today.  It so happens that he took up a camera at almost the exact same time that I did, but his interest never waned, and he did not let discouragement hinder his progress and eventually mastered of the art of photography.  His work is a great gift to us all.  His images and talent have matured wonderfully.  They are lyrical, magical and ethereal in character, suffused with a quality his friends call "Charlie light." 

I'm not saying I'd be as good as he is today.  I'm just noticing the way paths wend their way through time and take us here and there, through thick and thin.  I let my discouragement stop me and he did not.  Now his images are so beautiful and pure that they make everyone, including me, feel like it's an easy thing to do, which is always the mark of a fine master craftsman at work.  

I'm still clicking every so often, and I think sometime I'll invest in an exciting digital camera and learn to use Photoshop or Lightroom fluently.  A third exposure may do the trick.  

Recommended:  See Charles Cramer's work now until Jan. 9, 2011 at Sunset Center in Carmel where The Center For Photographic Arts (CFPA) is located.  There are 60 transcendent, beautiful images to admire.