A word about what I have learned while learning to use a camera

Everywhere I go, there is something worth photographing. As a rule, I always bring a camera. Whenever I don’t, I wish I had. Last weekend the VBM and I were out tooling around town and we came upon someone’s DIY bicycle-pulled teensy tiny travel trailer.
I didn’t have my camera. I kicked myself all the way home.
I love digital photography for the same reason everyone does—freedom from film. I can shoot a hundred pictures in a day and not like a single one, delete them, and go about my business having spent no time, effort or resources on the trappings of analog photography. I love my old film camera, but these digital gadgets are working out great for me.
When I am somewhere I think is beautiful, I notice that I focus very much on whatever it is that is causing me to experience the place as beautiful, and often I don’t notice other details about the place—like powerlines. These minutiae are always sneaking into the frame while I am busy being taken in by a mountain, or the sound of a river, or maybe the feeling that something predatory is nearby, sniffing the air. Come to think if it, I can be busily absorbed in a car, a flower, or the ground.
I spend a good deal of time in the woods, exploring, getting muddy, looking hard at the way the world got shaped by water and volcanoes. I started to take pictures of the powerlines a few months ago because they were always obscuring my view of the mountain. I tried to find places where the powerlines weren’t, and my free time got sucked up into trying to find a clear view. It occurred to me one day that I could just accept where I was the way it was instead of trying to get some place else.
Everywhere in life there is something we wish wasn’t there: the bus stop, the neighbor’s dandelion yard, the scratch on the brand new car.
I am a stubborn person. There are times when I really struggle with flexibility, and there are times when it comes easily for me. The more flexible I can be, the more easily I can move around. Accepting things I wish were different is something I find difficult. When I started using a camera, this lesson was constantly in my face all the time. My mom left a comment about the last post that I didn’t understand—I’m not pissed off about the powerlines. They are giving me a chance to feel what it is like to accept something I think is ugly, and doesn’t belong there, something that sullies my view.