When I started taking photos five or six years ago, I got almost daily e-mails from a well-known photographer named Chris, who lived in Chicago, he was dying of cancer, but somehow, he came across my blog and began commenting on my photographs.
He was bedridden, unable to stand up much, and I was a part-time hobby for him when he was alert. You are good at composition, he said, that is your strength.
He was sensitive to the fact that I am not especially open to instruction, I like to learn things for myself, and I don’t care for too much advice for the same reason. But he told me what he thought of my photos anyway, and I listened to him. I am not like Henry David Thoreau, but I admire his passion for experiencing the world himself, and figuring it out, he would not have cared for social media, where thousands of people are eager to tell you what to do every day.
I talked to Chris a few times before he died. You can take a beautiful photo of anything, he said, that is the big idea. And, he said, there is beauty everywhere if you train yourself to look for it. The camera will help you. So it has.
Photography is a personal and individual thing. Everybody takes different kinds of photos, everybody likes different kinds. Every day, someone e-mails me and tells me the photos I took today are my best, the ones I am best suited to do, the ones I am best at. Every day, the messages are about different kinds of photos – people are passionate about their own preferences, which is kind of nice, and every photo, I see, touches someone differently.
Today, I walked past an old birch tree in the forest, the afternoon sun was falling on it, and I saw a touch of white, of blue, of red, where the sun was reflecting off of a piece of bark, it seemed spiritual and luminous to me, and how, I wondered, could this tree seem so beautiful today when I have walked past it a thousand times and never even noticed it. I think that is the way of the world, if your eyes are open, you can see the world anew every time, see familiar things in a new way. The camera will help you do that also, as it has helped me.
I thought of Chris today, Maria and I took a walk with Lenore and Red, the white birch was precisely the kind of photo Chris loved the best, a fresh look at a common thing, a willingness to capture the everyday glory of real and ordinary life, in trees, buildings and people. From the first, I was drawn to the everyday things, I learned to see the beauty in the ordinary, that is my theme. Chris sent me a collection of his photographs before he died, and I look at them every now and then, he loved to photograph the barks of trees, he thought they had great character and meaning.
Look for emotion, he said, when you feel something in your heart, hit the shutter. You can’t go wrong. Do not ever listen to anybody else tell you what you should take a photo of, that is the road to damnation and blandness. If you feel it, the camera will catch it.