Pouring My Art Out

Taking photographs is an art, and like all art, it has hidden depths worth exploring. Just framing a nice shot in the lens of your camera is fun, and you can end up with some great shots, much like doing a paint-by-numbers  project allows you to end up with a painting, or sticking a frozen pizza in the oven allows you to end up with dinner. But exploring the depths is how you discover new things and hidden treasures.

That picture up there is simple enough. White flowers on a tree in bloom, and something looming indistinct in the background.

There is almost the same shot, but with the focus now set on the tower beyond the tree. I am not claiming to be any great photographer, and I am reasonably sure that there are settings on my camera that would have allowed me to take a third picture in which the flowers and the tower were both in focus. I am just making a point here.

Changing your perspective… the angle at which you look at anything… makes all the difference. What you focus your attention on at any given time is still part of a bigger picture, a world of depth and distance, light and shadow.

Life is the same way. You can overlook things by trying to look too closely, or with too much focus. It isn’t easy to see the towers and the flowers at the same time.

And even when you look more closely at just one thing, you might see something else. I hadn’t even noticed the yellowing leaves mixed in with the white flowers until I was resizing these pictures to put in the blog. There is a difference between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’.

Look beyond whatever you are seeing.