Clarifying our Vision...

An insight from my Walden Wood walk.

..the camera becomes more than a means to record our vision; it becomes a means to help clarify it. 

 - David duChenin

   Every time we put the camera to our eye we are attempting to record our vision but, as David duChenin states above, the images that we make help us to clarify that vision as well.  We may think we are making an image for one reason but the landscape may have an entirely different message for us.

   We record and edit.  In the old film days, we thought long and hard before we made an image.  We didn't want to waste film. Now there is no need to worry about that but people still feel the need to "trash" images to save space on their memory card.  I use to do that and now I never do.  I bring an external hard drive and download the entire days images...every last one.  As a friend once advised me..."Save them all...the good, the bad and the ugly."  The photograph above, and many like it, is the reason why I stopped deleting images from my card.

   It wasn't until long after my walk around Walden Pond that I came across this image in the file for that days photographing.  It stunned me really as I looked at it on the computer screen although it had hardly registered when I made it.  

    It seemed as if half the image was in black and white and half was in color but I assure you, this is what my camera recorded.  I made this photograph when I was just beginning to photograph in color...just stepping away from an exclusively monochrome approach to my vision as a photographer.  This image seemed to acknowledge that transition in a very graphic way.  I was able to reflect on it and see that there will always be these two sides to me and that's just fine.  I don't have to be one or the other...I can be both.

   Read the rest of duChenin's wonderful essay on vision here.  Make a promise to yourself, right now, that you will save all your photographs from now on.  They all have the potential for meaningful reflection.