Metaphor: Trees and Forest and Focus

I love the way photography offers metaphors for living. Here's one of them.

In photography, there are no trees. There is no forest. There is only depth of field.

(Definition: "depth of field" = how much of a photograph is in focus. Could be a lot, could be a little.)

So we need to focus. Not too near, not to far.

That's what I'm trying to do these days. Long-term thinking and planning, which is (permissively) imperative... while also getting today's highest priorities accomplished.

This tension can be difficult at the best of times. We have to make choices. We can't do it all, we can't focus on everything at once, near and far.

Long-term thinking tends to move us away from immediate priorities, as we ponder things like... what are my two biggest 5-year objectives and how do I get there? How will we fund our children's education? When will we retire? When will we spend several weeks in western China? How will I care for my parents over the next decade? You know, things which are real but don't relate to "today."

vs...

Is a bill due tomorrow (or yesterday), how can I be prepared for this afternoon's meeting, what surprise was just sprung on me, now's no time to get sick, do we need more milk? I need to exercise, I need enough sleep, and of course, "Ooh, shiny."

Most of our lives we are focused on immediate things, and occasionally if we happen to undertake such a discipline, we might also focus on longer-term planning, goals, objectives, and strategies.

Sometimes when meeting the insane demands of the current moment, we need lots of bokeh (bokeh : wikipedia). We regularly need to "throw" the longterm things (as beautiful as they might be) out of focus, off our radar, so we can efficiently accomplish the most important responsibilities of today and this week.

But if we continue to live this way, focusing only on the present (even if we get good at it, and some people are, damn them :) we may end up being controlled by circumstances rather than our dreams and goals.

On the other hand, if we focus only on the horizon's dreams and goals, we may live very rocky lives in the here and now, finding limited success at meeting today's responsibilities and tomorrow's obligations.

In photography, the amount of focus (depth of field) a photographer chooses is influenced by at least two things:

1. Subject (what the photographer is recording and what the image is about, on its own terms)
2. Vision (what the photographer sees / interprets, and would like to communicate about the subject)

In life, the amount of focus (depth of field) a person chooses is influenced by at least two things:

1. The needs of today (trees)
   
2. The dreams of tomorrow (forest)

And like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, I'm thinking there's a season for everything. There's a time when it's good to see today's trees. There's a time when it's good to see the long-term forecast, tomorrow's forest, the long, bird's eye view of all those tiny little trees from a wonderfully high altitude.

And daily life needs both. Sacrifice everything one for just the other, and we're in trouble. Maintaining both is hard, but it can be done.

That's all for today. :-)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox Meets the Nikon D3

The "Fantastic Mr. Fox" stop motion movie, just released, was shot completely with the Nikon D3.

35 workstations; 5,229 shots; 621,450 frames; 120GB data per day (18.5TB total).

One lazy director (jk) supervising the whole thing from his remote couch in Paris. :)

Here's a short "making of the movie" video, on wired.com.

Anybody making a movie with your DSLR? :)

And how much time and money do you suppose they saved on camera costs compared to yesterday's stop-motion cameras that would have been used, plus film processing, plus editing? I'd love to see more behind-the-scenes about this movie.

P.S. I love that the movie characters have "real" voices, while one of the guys who talks about making the movie has a cartoon voice. :)

IronMan Wisconsin - Swimmers

Niagara Falls Before & After

I decided to post the before and after - first one with no processing except the crop. Handheld, 1/4s, f/13, ISO 200, 8x ND.

This place had a hush and a roar at the same time - innocent and mesmerizing but also powerful and deadly.

In one place it was quite strange to stand 3 feet from where the water quietly glided over the edge.

I tend to not do a lot of post-processing, but I'm not a "purist" either. With artistic images, I don't have qualms about doing moderate or extreme things to an image to achieve a desired effect. I should experiment more than I do, just to see what's possible.

Niagara Falls

This is *way* more processing in Lightroom (very light original image + recovery, blacks, vibrance) than I usually do.

I just felt like it, I like the resulting mood. This is not what I shot, but somehow it represents what I felt.

As a family we only spent a couple hours in the area. I could easily spend a week or two shooting in this place, with all the light, mist, water, lines, and gravity. It felt powerful!

And we made some interesting demographic observations about the other tourists. Ask me sometime. :-)

Horses

I've had several opportunities to shoot horses (with a camera) over the past few weeks. They're such beautiful and intelligent animals.

I have lots more editing to do but here are a couple "hortraits" and one of a very friendly interaction between a horse and a dog, they just nuzzled for a while.

Passion and Imagination

I have several passions. They change over time, they do ebb and flow with some sort of tide and timing.

One of the staying-power lasting passions for me after 46 years is for the visual arts, specifically photography: recording glimpses of things which represent other deeper things.

Like any healthy passion pursuit, there are many aspects of and outlets for this passion of mine. I like that.

I make images / photographs almost every day. Some are casual and careless; others are intentional and serious.

On the days I don't make them, I definitely consume images, taste them, ponder them, dream of making them, refine my mental framework about visual images.

My worst nightmare would be to become blind, I sometimes think. But in a strange way, I would probably accept even blindness (just as every person who is blind must do), and I think my passion for the visual would not go away, it would just adapt.

Much of our vision is imagination. We see a ball, but we imagine childhood, play, innocence, leisure, competition, cohesion, teamwork, or perhaps many other things. We even imagine things that are not possible to see, triggered by the things we see.

If we were to lose our sight, we'd still have imagination, which spans much broader and deeper than physical sight.

Imagination is a form of faith: wondering, hoping, believing, conjuring, placing trust in what might be even if we don't exactly see it.

There's so much mystery in this realm of sight and imagination that I expect I'll never lose my passion for photography. It's poetry for the eyes; and when poetry really moves you there's no explanation, there's only mystery.