“I opened two gifts this morning. They were my eyes.” ~ Unknown
Recently I discovered this quote, and it made me smile. It’s easy to take for granted the gift of sight, and just as easy to overlook all the incredible beauty that surrounds us.
As a photographer, I am always searching for beauty. Part of what makes the art of photography so fascinating is the camera’s (and the photographer’s) ability to capture ordinary things and present them in extraordinary ways.
Perhaps it’s the ordinary-looking creek you drive past every morning that suddenly appears magical in the golden mist of a frigid January dawn . . .
Or perhaps it’s the ordinary twig that glistens with fresh water droplets in the cheery sunshine after the rain . . .
Or maybe it’s a familiar face who poses for a portrait and appears in a way you had never seen them before . . .
Discovering, capturing and presenting beauty is a never-ending pursuit for the photographer. Photographers train their eyes to look for certain shafts of light, certain angles in a face, certain colors in a sky.
However, sometimes our eyes have their limits since there are plenty of beautiful things not visible to the naked eye. This is where the camera can step in and reveal astonishing images that our eyes miss.
For example, there are moments that happen much too fast for our eyes to grasp or appreciate–those fraction-of-a-second moments that occur in the blink of an eye.
This is probably why I am particularly fond of action photographs–moments frozen at a splinter of a second, moments we could never fully behold with our naked eye but can savor and study thanks to the slick sophistication of the camera.
The Canon 5D Mark III (my camera) has a shutter capability of 1/8000 of a second.
Think about that for a moment—1/8000 of a second!!! That’s faster than the fastest of fast, wouldn’t you say?
I love to shoot at high shutter speeds. It’s as if the camera says to me, “Hey, while you were blinking, this happened”. . .
It is stunning to harness these rare moments and then study them for all their elusive, surprising glory.
The photographer never knows exactly what they will snare, and it’s an exciting feeling–like casting a fishing line into a lake filled with prize-winning whoppers. You never know what you’ll catch next!
Below is an image captured a couple of days ago at Lake Erie at sunset. The hair flip happened much too fast for me to really appreciate it, but the camera recorded every split second, and now I can enjoy the moment and the memory for many years to come.
Isn’t photography amazing? Harnessing time. . . seeing things you couldn’t otherwise see with your naked eye. . . At those fraction of a second shutter speeds, I never know what I will capture next. And I love it. 🙂