I take a lot of pictures. I love noticing and capturing nouns in action—people, places, creatures, nature.
Taking pictures of nouns in action is one way I express love.
I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager, long before Instagram gave us somewhere to put the pictures. The pleasure has always been in the taking. In seeing something that catches me and managing to catch it in return.
And sometimes, oh, what a catch!
Behind the Lens
At a recent birthday party, I wandered around photographing friends enjoying themselves. I love candid shots, those wonderfully unarranged moments when people are laughing, talking, gesturing, and generally being their glorious selves.
But something funny happens when people notice the camera. They stop what they’re doing, gather together, and pose.
I have nothing against posing. I’ve taken plenty of lovely posed photographs. But there’s something delicious about catching life before it notices the lens.
At another gathering, I caught a friend attempting to retrieve a berry from the bottom of her glass by suctioning the glass to her face. It was ridiculous, charming, and pure gold. I couldn’t have arranged that moment if I’d tried.
Of course, not every candid photograph is flattering. Nor is every posed one. Someone looks fabulous while the person beside them has their eyes closed and mouth open. I’ve certainly had my share of photographs that made me shrink. And others that made me smile and think, Oh, there I am.
The lens doesn’t lie. But it does love.
Always and Never the Same
My phone contains thousands of photographs of the sky. The sun, moon, clouds, often from precisely the same location.
Some are breathtaking. Many are astonishingly dull. And still, I keep taking them.
The subjects are familiar, but there’s always another expression, another arrangement of light, another moment that has never happened quite this way before.
Like the people I love, they’re always and never the same.
And then, there were the cows.
More than fifteen years ago, driving through the Belgian countryside, I spotted the most magnificent black-and-white cows arranged in an emerald-green pasture. The scene was perfection.
I couldn’t get my camera in time. The road carried us onward, but that picture stayed with me. I can still see them. They’ve become the ones that got away.
Those damned cows!
I’ve made my husband pull off highways to photograph rows of trees. I’ve worn my phone on a cross-body strap for well over a decade. Not especially fashionable, but extraordinarily useful when magic appears without an appointment.
I long to capture all that captures me.
Nothing has to come of it. No audience, no applause, no particular purpose beyond the pleasure of looking, loving, and occasionally catching something wonderful.
And somewhere in Belgium, I suspect a few cows are still holding their pose, waiting for me to circle back.