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.

The Hermes*, Digital SLR edition

I have always been a photo enthusiast, but it was way out of my budget to do much with it in the olden days when I was in college and also there was only film in cameras. All the sudden they started putting megapixels in cameras! Last year, I bought a little point and shoot camera and used it every single day while my lovely 35mm film SLR languishes in a box in the closet. I am finding myself looking, looking, and looking at things, and my free time is largely spent walking around with that little camera. It has felt much like hanging around with an old friend I've known forever, this walking around and looking into a part of me that is kind of fearlessly creative.
And not that it matters, but okay it does, other people like looking at what I look at.
Though I take the kudos somewhat the same way I do when my dad writes me an email and tells me I should have my own newspaper column (which is a really great thing to get from this guy on so many levels but he is, after all, a biased dad and maybe he doesn't read very much ranting on the internet besides mine), I still have this little thought when I look at my photos:
These are good. And I don't even do anything with them--they are pretty much as I shoot them. Right now I am downloading photoshop elements, and I am yearning with every cell in my body for one of these.
I love the portability of my digital Elph. I love that it is always in my bag or my pocket. But I'm feeling ready to relearn the nuts and bolts of photography--light and time, those things that made me want to take pictures in the first place. Having a gadget as a tool is icing on the cake for a gadgetophile like me. I've got the old hermes for a camera that feels like a camera when I hold it. A camera I can use to access a little deeper that small unfettered eye I've grown to love to use.

*The Hermes: a term coined, near as I can tell, by my dad. Connotative meaning: really really wanting to buy something. The buying of the thing is inevitable.