Curious Air of Hyper-Reality

"I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?"

- W.G. Sebald (1944 - 2001)
The Rings of Saturn

Dreams and Apparitions

"Dreams, as we all know, are very curious things: certain incidents in them are presented with quite uncanny vividness, each detail executed with the finishing touch of a jeweller, while others you leap across as though entirely unaware of, for instance, space and time. Dreams seem to be induced not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what clever tricks my reason has sometimes played on me in dreams!"

- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881)
Notes from Underground

Dreaming and Seeing

"The diagram in the ashes had two epicenters; one he called “reason,” the other, “will.” “Reason” was interconnected directly with a point he called “talking.” Through “talking,” “reason” was indirectly connected to three other points, “feeling,” “dreaming,” and “seeing.” The other epicenter, “will,” was directly connected to “feeling,” “dreaming,” and “seeing”; but only indirectly to “reason” and “talking.” I remarked that the diagram was different from the one I had recorded years before. “The outer form is of no importance,” he said. “These points represent a human being and can be drawn in any way you want.” “Do they represent the body of a human being?” I asked. “Don’t call it the body” he said. “These are eight points on the fibers of a luminous being. A sorcerer says, as you can see in the diagram, that a human being is, first of all, will, because will is directly connected to three points, feeling, dreaming, and seeing; then next, a human being is reason. This is properly a center that is smaller than will; it is connected only with talking.” “What are the other two points, don Juan?” He looked at me and smiled."

- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
Tales of Power

Pondering Reality

“Perhaps the world was actually different

from the one I had begun to perceive.

Every man who had ever lived became a

contributor to the evolution of the earth,

since his observations were a part of its growth.

The world was thus a place entirely constructed

from thought, ever changing, constantly

renewing itself through the process of

mankind’s pondering its reality for themselves.”

— James Cowan (1942 - )

A Mapmaker’s Dream

Wordless Influences

"The mountain photographer is interpreting the face of nature–that mysterious infinity, eternally a refuge, a reservoir, an amplifier of spirit; a mother of dreams; a positive though elusive voice in whose depth lies its subtlety. They will interpret best who are never so content as when under the influence of situations where silence is rich in the mute assurance and beauty of mountain surroundings. The quality of emotional knowing has a finer integration with our spirit than anything that comes from barren intellectual processes. This point of view only accumulates slowly, out of long experience and contact with wordless influences. Under the spell of solitude and of natural beauty the root system of this kind of awareness establishes itself. Great art is usually created under some such saturation of awareness. The work is then permeated with an inner perception of beauty and an inner personal philosophy. The hope for our photography is that it shall retain these high lights of more than beauty, that through it symbols shall be preserved of response to our mountains, keeping them to a flow, a golden thread, in our experience." - Cedric Wright (1889 - 1959)

The Same and Not the Same

"Wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things...As the same things in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these...Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not." - Heraclitus

When my parents, my dad's parents, and I visited Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser in 1970, I remember it as an unassuming "mound" with steam coming out (before the awe I felt upon witnessing its eruption for the first time as a 10yo!), nestled slightly beyond a small walkway from Yellowstone's famous old faithful inn (built in 1904). There were no main thoroughfares, no parking lots (save that for a relatively small one near the inn), no boardwalks. We parked our car right by the geyser, walked out to Old Faithful, waited about 20 minutes or so for it to erupt (it was a bit more regular than it is now, thanks to myriad small earthquakes over the intervening years that have affected subterranean water levels), and were on our way. My, how times have changed! Or have they...?

Nowadays, the area around Old Faithful resembles more a small town - with a major parkway leading into it, several huge parking areas, lodging, shopping, a nature center, and more boardwalks than Coney Island and Atlantic City combined (or so it seemed) - than some "not easy to be discovered" marvel of nature. One could be forgiven for missing the geyser entirely, given the voluminous activity swarming all around it, passerbys appearing more interested in licking ice-cream cones and texting their friends back home about how "great Yellowstone is" than waiting for Yellowstone's patient sentinel to burp its superheated water for a few minutes. More than once did I hear a child ask her parents, "Where is the geyser, mommy?" while standing almost directly in front of it!

While it is easy to lament the "loss of innocence" (I lamented a different, more personal, loss in my last blog entry) associated with the development of any natural park designed for public consumption (the deepest personal lament of this kind may arguably be ascribed to Ansel Adams, who - in revealing the stupendous beauty of Yosemite Valley to the public - also rendered it forever impossible to experience as an isolated wilderness, I will not dwell on this aspect of our experience of Yellowstone; instead, I will muse on what I found at Old Faithful in more general terms of what it says about the impermanence - and permanence - of reality.

On the crudest level, Old Faithful remains "Old Faithful"; i.e., it is a geyser (located about 17 miles west of West Thumb Basin) with a more-or-less regular eruption schedule (about 65 minutes in 1940 to 90 +/- 10 minutes today). The dynamics of its eruptions has remained the same, even as the individual molecules of water continually change from eruption to eruption. But as I've just described, the visitor's experience of Old Faithful is dramatically different from what it once was (and was for me in 1970). Where, in decades past, one could view the geyser in relative isolation (if one so chose) - a communion, of sorts, between civilization and pristine nature - such a communion is now all-but-impossible, as Old Faithful must compete with impatient swarms of jostling and always-chattering bodies, not-so-distant belches of diesel-powered RVs and trucks, and an occasional screech of tires as cars and buses attempt to avoid wandering hordes of tourists lost -or soon to be - in vast parking lots. Meditation helps, of course, to refocus the mind on the Old Faithful; and, truth be told, the sheer wonder and delight of seeing a massive 150+ foot column of super-heated steam and water suddenly erupt from a hole in the ground never gets old. The child-like state of innocence I wrote about in my previous post was, during this trip, perhaps easiest to realize at Old Faithful, where one cannot help but stand slack-jawed in awe of nature's magic. My experience of the erupting geyser - sans surrounding noise and clicking cameras - was essentially what I remember it being 42 years ago.

But, in the end, what do we really mean by "Old Faithful"? Is it the geyser? the geyser erupting? the water underneath the geyser? the surrounding area? the "experience" of watching "it" erupt? the tourist-driven infrastructure that envelopes "it" (and all surrounding geysers)? What has remained the same, and what has really changed? Labels, labels, and more arbitrary labels, all pointing to "something," and yet none describing anything of lasting meaning or value. 

And so, how fitting it is that an old "faithful" wonder - the same and yet not the same as it once was - sagely reminds this self-professed observer of wonders of the folly of wondering about the labels of things. "Old Faithful" is as an imprecise, imperfect label of a "geyser" in Yellowstone as "Andy" is an essentially vacuous label of a "photographer on an RV trip to Yellowstone with his family." Impermanence bleeds from words and arbitrary attachments; and permanence is but an impermanent illusion. All things are the same and not the same. And Old Faithful is no "thing."

"We are like the spider.

We weave our life

and then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer who dreams

and then lives in the dream.

This is true for

the entire universe." 

- Upanishads

Poetics of Space

"House, patch of meadow, oh evening light

Suddenly you acquire an almost human face

You are very near us,

embracing and embraced."

- RAINER MARIA RILKE

"Our house is our corner of the universe... it is our universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty... The house, like fire and water...[recalls]... flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasure of former days... We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection... The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace... The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

- GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Dreaming with Open Eyes

"From the mast-head the mirage is continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud-banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into view, although it really is outside our range of vision. Worst of all is the deceptive appearance of open water, caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice-cliffs below the horizon."

- Sir Ernest Shackleton, South! 

(from Captain's log of "Endurance")

“...you go into a state almost like an aware kind of sleep, which means you’re all free, just let it be, let it become, and with tremendous compassion towards everything—maybe human beings, or nature, or objects—you incorporate. It’s almost like a... in Buddhism, you would say incarnation. You become things, you become at atmosphere. And if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do do it. And a musician can do it, and I think a photographer can do that too. And that I would call the dreaming with open eyes."

- Ernst Haas, To Dream with Open Eyes

Postscript: Kind readers/viewers wishing to learn the "truth" behind the surreal dream-like seascape depicted above, may reveal the unabashed "reality" by clicking here; but be forewarned that doing so will also unavoidably strip away all essential meaning. Perhaps there is an aesthetic / semiotic analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at play here, wherein one cannot simultaneously both "know" (the truth behind) something and "understand" it equally well ;-)

Anicca / Mi rtag pa / Mujō

"We are like the spider.

We weave our life and

then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer

who dreams and then

lives in the dream.

This is true for

the entire universe."

- Upanishads

"All formations are transient (anicca)"

- Buddha Sakyamuni
(563 - 483 B.C)

Reflections and Illusions

"You have heard much of this world
yet what you seen of this world?
What is its form and substance?...
You are asleep and your vision is a dream;
all you are seeing is a mirage.
When you awake up on the morn of the last day
you will know all this to be fancy and illusion;
When you have ceased to see double,
Heaven and Earth will become transformed;
when the real sun unveils his face to ou,
the moon, the stars,and Venus will disappear;
if a ray shines on the hard rock
like wool of many colors, it drops to pieces."
-Mahmud Shabistari
Sufi Poet
(1288 - 1340)

"Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?

I should certainly say that such a one was dreaming.

But take the case of the other, who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects-- is he a dreamer, or is he awake?"

-Plato, The Republic

Dreams and Phantasms

“The objects of sense in the world ever changing — These we adhere to as things of reality; But in the ocean of birth and death, they drown us. How long shall we wander in this path of dreams? This world to us! Indeed seems permanent and fixed, yet after all, what is it but a road of dreams to which life after life we must perforce return?”

- Zeami Motokiyo (1363 - 1443)

Aesthetician / Playright

"All things are to be regarded as forms seen in a vision and a dream, empty of substance, un-born and without self-nature; that all things exist only by reason of a complicated network of causation which owes its rise to discrimination and attachment and which eventuates in the rise of the mind-system and its belongings and evolvements."

- Lankavatara Sutra, VII

The Castle

"The young man apologized very politely for having awakened K., introduced himself as the son of the Castle steward and said:

'This village is Castle property, anybody residing or spending the night here is effectively residing or spending the night at the Castle. Nobody may do so without permission from the Count. But you have no such permission or at least you haven't shown it yet.'

K., who had half-risen and smoothed his hair, looked at the people from below and said: 'What village have I wandered into? So there is a castle here?'

'Why, of course,' the young man said slowly, while several peasants here and there shook their heads at K., 'the Castle of Count Westwest.'

'And one needs permission to spend the night here?' asked K., as though he wanted to persuade himself that he hadn't perhaps heard the previous statements in a dream.

'Permission is needed' was the reply, and this turned into crude mockery at K.'s expense when the young man, stretching out his arm, asked the landlord and the guests: 'Or perhaps permission is not needed?'

'Then I must go and get myself permission,' said K., yawning and pushing off the blanket, as though he intended to get up.

'Yes, but from whom?' asked the young man.

'From the Count,' said K., 'there doesn't seem to be any alternative.'

'Get permission from the Count, now, at midnight?' cried the young man, stepping back a pace.

'Is that not possible?' K. asked calmly. 'Then why did you wake me up?'"

-Franz Kafka (The Castle)

Memories, Dreams, and Perceptions

"Our whole past store of memories floats

beyond its margin, ready at a touch to come in;
and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses,
and knowledges that constitute our empirical
self stretches continuously beyond it.

So vaguely drawn are the outlines
between what is actual and
what is only potential at any
moment of our conscious life,
that it is always hard to say of
certain mental elements
whether we are conscious of them or not."

— William James (1842-1910)The Varieties of Religious Experience

Another "Light of an Enlightened Eye" Extinguished :-(

Although I have never met Loori, a few years ago I stumbled across an extraordinary book of his called The Zen of Creativity, and have been admiring - and following - his work ever since. This book (which I've had to purchase a second copy of because my first copy is riddled with creased page corners bookmarking its veritable storehouse of distilled wisdom) turned out to be but one of many, many spiritually rich books he has authored - on Zen, photography, and the creative life in general - and illustrated with his own deeply soulful images. It should come as no surprise that Loori's spiritual / photographic journey started sometime in the early 70s when he attended a workshop conducted by Minor White, who was himself - arguably - the finest "spiritual leader" of photography of his era. Loori not only continued on with his own masterful photography, but eventually became one of the West's leading Zen masters. He was also the founder and spiritual leader of the Mountains and Rivers Order and abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York's Catskill mountains.

Another book of Loori's that I own and treasure, and which perfectly illustrates his basic philosophy of nonseperability between art and spiritual practice, is Hearing with the Eye. This book - ostensibly a collection of images that Loori captured around Point Lobos, California (fused with a quiet but illuminating prose) - is a gentle, graceful meditation on the illusory boundaries between inner and outer realities. Much the same, and more, can be found in another, and even more recent, of Loori's books, called Making Love with Light.

A detailed account of his life and philosophy (including links to YouTube videos and a portfolio of his photography) can be found on the Mountains and Rivers Order site by following this link.

There are a total 24 books in all listed on Amazon's Loori page. The aspiring Zen student wondering about what creativity has to say about life, and/or the aspiring (or seasoned) photographer wondering about what Zen practice has to say about taking pictures - and even the stray physicist or two who may secretly wonder about whether there is more to the universe than what equations alone reveal - can have no better companion to start exploring these "wonderings" with than Loori, via his writings and photographs.

Though I may never have been graced by Loori's physical presence as a "teacher," I - and therefore my own work and vision - have nonetheless been deeply touched by the lessons and wisdom of this graceful soul. And, although there obviously remain plenty of souls left on this planet who can communicate to the rest of us beautiful and delicate eternal truths with their cameras (and "gifted seers" are - luckily for the world - born every day), this one preternaturally enlightened "eye" is - mournfully - no more (but only so far as corporeal existence goes).

"To know objects only through dissecting and cataloguing them is to miss their full reality. It is to fall asleep amidst the mystery and to become numb to the wonder of this great Earth." - John Daido Loori

Learning to See from the Blind

Fine-art photography is first-and-foremost a visual language by which otherwise hidden truths and meanings - of the world and self - are revealed by the observer / artist. As such, it is rarely the case that what a photograph shows on its surface is the complete "message" that the photographer wishes to communicate. Indeed, philosophically speaking, one can say that fine-art photographers use images to provide glimpses of a reality that lies behind (and beyond) what the images represent, as things-in-themselves. Just as letters and words provide the basic units of grammar for literary artists to communicate essential truths that have nothing to do with letters and words, so too do light and form provide the visual grammar by which photographers reveal fundamental truths of nature (and our relationship with it) that have nothing to do with light and form. Art transforms the abject banality of sterile rules, internalized through years of rote memorization and practice, into an intimate expression of the ineffable.

So it should come as no great surprise (though, undoubtedly it will) that the blind - yes, the blind (!) - have much to teach those of us who are sighted about what real "sight" means. The image at the top of this blog entry is of the cover of an extraordinary book called Seeing Beyond Sight, lovingly put together by visual artist, Tony Deifell, and published by Chronicle Books in 2007. The book collects the works of visually impaired children during a five-year program of teaching photography to students at Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 1992 to 1997. The book has a dedicated website; and an interview with the author has recently been posted on YouTube.

Mr. Deifell quickly addresses the most obvious question: "How can you teach photography to the blind?" On a practical level, even though most of the students involved could not see light, all of them were able to feel the heat due to light. Moreover, blindness does not preclude anyone from achieving a technical understanding of how a camera works, nor of learning the rudiments of good imaging technique. The more difficult question to answer - and what the book so beautifully explains by showing - is "How can the blind take pictures?" In a conventional sense, of course, they cannot; but only if by "taking pictures" we mean using the camera to record what they see visually. However, photography, in its purest form, is so much more than that.

Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Minor White - among many other great "photographic seers" - teach us that the finest photography occurs when we are able to (recognize and) capture that special sliver of time during which the boundary between inner and outer experiences vanishes. Steiglitz called such photographs equivalents; Cartier-Bresson referred to the sliver of time as the decisive moment; and Minor White talked often of the profound role that spirit plays in photography:

"Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence." - Minor White (1908 - 1976)

But whatever one chooses to call it, the underlying process - for the photographer - is always the same: the camera is merely a mechanical device (and certainly not the only such mechanical device, nor even necessarily the best one to use for this purpose!) that serves to focus our attention (to pressing the shutter) at precisely the right moment when our inner and external experiences align.

"I was thinking that it would be sort of hard for a blind person to take pictures, but it's not very hard. You've just got to listen." (John V., student, quoted on page 48 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

When the "feel is right" - when everything is in its place, when all the compositional elements have snapped into their positions, the shadows and forms are just where they all must be, and when, for the blind, the warmth of the sunlight on the wall is just so, the wind has quieted down, and is no longer heard, the reverberations of distant footsteps are no longer felt, and the texture of the floor is just the right mix of smooth and rugged against the palm of the hand, then we hit the shutter.

In truth, the sighted photographer responds no more to purely visual stimuli than does the blind photographer. All photographers, whether they do so consciously or not (and whether they are aware of it or not) depend on all of their senses to reach that wonderful instant when the shutter goes "click." One can argue that blind photographers, precisely because they do not respond directly to visual stimuli, are actually closer to the core truths and realities that lie beyond the light than photographers who must work their way through to truth (by brute force, so to speak).

Anyone can take a picture of a tree; because that is what is in front of the camera. It takes an artist to use the image of the tree to show you something else about the tree, or something else entirely that has nothing do with the tree per se. Since the visually impaired photographer has difficulty seeing the tree as a tree - indeed, the blind photographer does not see a tree at all - other associations and meanings must necessarily arise that, ultimately, result in some inner train of thought / intuition that concludes with the photographer making the camera go click.

Just as I consider color a "distraction" to the purity of forms and tonalities I try to reveal with my black and white photographs, I can see how light itself can be a distraction if what I am really after is illumination of what light reveals to me (but which I cannot take a picture of directly). It is a great irony - paradox even (!) - of photography that it so deeply but mechanically depends on something (i.e., light) that is, in fact, rarely the focus of its intended message. Even if the light itself is the message (as exemplified by, say, Galen Rowell's lifelong artistic pursuits), the photograph can only capture the effect that light has on whatever environment the photographer has selected to take a picture in, not the light in situ.

There is a touching - or, better, an illuminating - story about a blind student named Leuwynda, who captured a series of wonderful "abstract" photos of cracks in the sidewalk; which she clearly "saw" with her walking cane but which most people are oblivious to. She used her photographs as documentary "proof" of the danger that blind students face in what most would consider uneventfully "short walks" to class, and sent her images along with a letter containing a plea for help to the superintendent. Mr. Deifell muses, on behalf of the rest of us "sighted" photographers, about how many "cracks" there are in the world that we are essentially all blind to?

"If the lights are off, I can see what I'm doing." (Dain, student, quoted on page 138 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

Another student, Josh, produced some soulful photographs of dark, blurry stairs that he used to communicate - via metaphor - a dream he had about being lost and wandering aimlessly in a snowstorm. Other students started using their growing collections of photographs as a means to develop otherwise under-developed communication skills. Merlett, for example, was both blind and learning disabled, and found reading and writing akin to torture. Photography provided a new - and joyous - language in which she could express herself and, as it turned out, tell all the stories she had always wanted to tell others but could not do so in a conventional way.

The book contains a short introduction by the author (and teacher), followed by a selection of student photographs organized into five sections: (1) distortion, (2) refraction, (3) reflection, (4) transparence, and (5) illuminance. It concludes with an afterward, a short FAQ, and a summary of where the students who participated in the project are today.

"How do you not cut people's heads off in a photo? Just ask the person where they are." (Frances, student, quoted on page 112 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

For me, the book (and the project on which it is based) is a revelation. Were it not for the context in which the images in this book were captured, and the accompanying stories of how individual images came to be, one would be tempted to "dismiss" many of the photographs as "amateurish" and merit-less as fine-art. And that would be sadly unfortunate; for these images go to the heart of human experience and artistic expression. They show us what lies beyond the light that illuminates what we take pictures of, and what all photographers - with and without the gift of sight - are trying to reveal with their photography.

Anybody with a decent camera can take a picture of a crack in the sidewalk - and have the image met with blank stares and mutterings of "Yeah, it's a crack in the sidewalk., so what?" It takes a blind photographer to so effortlessly use a physical symbol - i.e., a photograph of some "thing" - to represent the deeper, inner experience of how "difficult it is to walk to class" on a campus built by people who can see. By not being able to see things, the blind photographer naturally focuses on using the things that the camera is able to capture to show what else things are. And that is what the very best photography has always been about.

While I have focused mainly on the philosophical end of the spectrum in this short commentary, I would be remiss in not mentioning that I was just as struck about how powerful a general learning tool - about self, about world, about learning (!) - the project was for the students involved. In some ways, though not quite as "obviously" dramatic - the results of the project remind me of Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (though here the "awakenings" are more spiritual than physical).

The blind obviously have much to teach us sighted photographers how to really see. They teach us to pay attention to all of the little "invisible cracks" in the world, and to not rely exclusively on our eyes in doing so. There is no better place to begin the first lesson on this journey of illumination - which takes the form of a gentle admonition to just "close your eyes" - than to savor the examples in this magnificent book, Seeing Beyond Sight. Highly recommended.

Postscript #1: There is recent evidence that suggests that "blindsight" - i.e., the ability "see" even if completely blind to visual stimuli - is real (and is due to previously unknown ancient evolutionary sensory pathways). See Blind Man Navigates Maze.

Postscript #2: A few days after posting my blog entry, I ran across another review of Seeing Beyond Sight very much in the spirit of mine; which is to say, philosophically infused and considerably more about "seeing" than seeing.

Postscript #3: There is a similar, but unrelated, book about photography by visually impaired photographers, called Shooting Blind, published by Aperture. An associated website also contains some extraordinarily haunting photographs.

"Chance Favors the Prepared Mind"

"Chance favors the prepared mind," Ansel Adams was fond of saying (though the original quote comes from Louis Pasteur). I was reminded of the wisdom of this aphorism during a recent trip my family and I took to Coral Gables, Florida. Armed, as usual, with my camera-bag's worth of equipment, I had a carefully preconceived plan in place to visit some of my favorite "photo-safari" haunts. I know the area well from my many visits, and places such as Fairchild Gardens and Vizcaya were firmly at the top of my list. While they didn't disappoint (they never do), and each offers delightful compositional opportunities, through no fault of theirs - since I was the one who deliberately chose them for my photo-safari - my muse was unfortunately struggling to stay awake.

There is a feeling, roughly analogous to the common dream of running through molasses, that overcomes all photographers at some point when they've prepared too much. Everything is "right", all the equipment works, the lenses are clean, the camera bag has exactly what you need, the light is right, the location is right, beautiful vistas are all around you, and ... nothing happens. There is no magic. No spark. You lift your (strangely, much heavier-than-normal) camera to your eye, and - maybe - at some point click its shutter more to alleviate the growing boredom than because of anything that strikes your aesthetic eye as "interesting." And yet, everything, objectively speaking, is perfect. How can that possibly be?, you wonder Everything is just right. All photographers - all artists - know exactly what I'm writing about.

Now, skip ahead to the last day of my family's trip. The rain starts to fall in the morning, and is unrelenting; and with it, so I think, wash away my last hopes of savoring an "Aha!" moment at Fairchild or Vizcaya. Finally, the sky clears, it is late in the day, and my kids want to go feed the pelicans at a nearby park (Matheson Hammock Park Beach). Sulking from my trip-long funk, I want to leave my camera behind (something I almost never do). My wife (as she always does;-) reminds me that I almost never do that, and gently urges me to bring it along, which I do, reluctantly (and expect nothing more than to get some quick grabs of the kids feeding their pelicans, if even that). Which is, indeed, exactly what happens. No muse, no sparks, just that same monotonous, lifeless "clicks" as before...and then the magic happens!... just as the kids finish feeding their pelicans and everyone starts walking back toward our car.

While putting away my camera, my trip-long, nearly comatose "photographer's eye/intuition" finally awakens, and forces me to glance over my shoulder...and I am absolutely transfixed by the magnificent cacophony of lines, shadows and light playing on the rapidly darkening, and by now deserted, marina. Literally breathlessly, I reset my tripod, rifle through my bag for a 3-stop ND filter (to get at least a 15 sec exposure to blur the small waves), compose more on instinct than design, and take one shot. At which time my wife and kids are already getting antsy, and remind me that dinner is waiting and that they're all hungry. And the magic goes Poof!

But what a moment. While my one shot - reproduced at the top of this blog entry - may not be an award winner, it is by far my best shot of the whole trip. It is also the one shot I didn't plan on taking at all; though I was prepared!

I hope I'll remember this little lesson in humility, though I recall saying those same words to myself countless times before, and such experiences still obviously take me by surprise when they happen. Although I almost always "plan" on going to certain places (that's my style), and always have at least some idea of what I'm "after" when I get there (in concept, if not detail), I also always try to be prepared for when chance decides to pay me a quick visit. Indeed, as a photographer, I live for these moments!