I’m procrastinating again, because I don’t want to face yet another unbroken day at the computer. I have two pending tasks, one, choose the portfolio images for my website remodel, and two, prepare a Getty disk. I’ve spent this week archiving the last two months of work (making sure I had it all in one place, archiving the cr2 files on DVDs, converting to DNG and ingesting them all into Iview). For April I archived 4,800 images, for May, 4,400. I am so behind in captioning/keywording/catagorizing.
So I went out to take more pictures, and to look at some birds. One of my favorite spots for this dual attention is just down the hill from my house, at Montlake Fill. It’s an old garbage dump on the shores of Lake Washington that has grown up to be superb birding habitat inside the city.
I had my lightweight travel binoculars, and my 5D with a 50mm macro lens, which made that rig much lighter than usual. A female Yellowthroat scolded me from a willow. Red-wing Blackbirds called a bubbly chip call, not their full-throated territory song (they don’t need mates anymore, now there are kids to manage). Savannah Sparrows were singing (they sound like grasshoppers), White-crown Sparrows sang "Zwee, zwee, Zwiggy-zwiggy zwee." A woman was stopped on the path, staring into the bushes by the second pond. "These crows, they have a hawk pinned down at the bottom of this bush," she informed me.
I wandered off the path, into an area that burned last summer. These black sticks have pulled me their direction for the last nine months. Now they were nearly lost amid the tall green grass. Soon I was in that near-trance state I like to get into, where I begin to photograph from that place beneath my awareness. I lose the composing photographer’s eyes, and begin responding to the place from elsewhere in my body. I’m shooting a lot, but it is anything but randomly. I feel like I’m approaching the photograph that is somewhere in front of me, and I feel it inside my body. A part of me is watching the picture happen, and I’m only partly aware of a composition forming. This environment is too dense to structure it consciously no matter what, which is why I like to insert myself in these spots. It is as though the complexity swamps the familiar responses to organizing inside a frame, and I can access a deeper level of seeing.
I can’t stay submerged in this state for very long. After a few minutes I feel done. Somewhere down there a photograph happened, and it’s captured on the card. I’ll look at it another time. Right now I hear a flock of goldfinches flying over.
Very nice meditaion, Doug. And I loved hearing about your polka! Truly, we here in Seattle live in a most wonderful place.
Posted by: Gerard van Wesep | June 02, 2006 at 01:30 PM