Whale! 🐋

After a decade of taking photos, I realized photography comes down to one thing: learning how to see. I spend a lot of time observing the world in front of me. 

We don’t observe the world anymore. We are either observing through our phones or through some medium that isn’t reality. The screens are always in front of us, omnipresent. As a photographer, I admit my vision is limited through a camera’s viewfinder, or a 3” LCD display, or a rectangular 2-dimension piece of paper. I will aways have a tendency to film or photograph a subject so I can enjoy it later, and missing out on the actual moment itself. 

When you start observing before taking the shot, you start to develop a vision for a photograph before you even hold the camera to your eye. I’m constantly looking for interesting subjects, harmonious colors, lines, symmetry, and shapes. You notice patterns second by second, minute by minute, day by day, and year after year. To spend hours or days watching the clouds, checking the surf, trying to see and predict patterns in nature, you develop an intuition for the right moment. It’s that fraction in time when you finally click the shutter. 

You can see things on a macro or micro scale, from the tiniest of details in a forest to vast landscapes. You notice things that most people didn’t even know was there! 

I can instantly discern a Humpback whale’s 🐋 spout from the white caps miles out at sea.  

I can see a hiker at the summit of a mountain 🏔️ from 5000 feet below.  

I can see microscopic critters on a mushroom 🍄 when most people walked right by. 

Often times when I don’t have a camera on me, I can still envision the photographs through my own two eyes. Ooooh that’s a nice landscape right there! 

But being an observer is not just about seeing a good composition for a photograph; I’ve learned see the world from a third person perspective. I see congruity and developed a holistic view of the world. I see how everything is connected, even causations and correlations and why certain things happen. By being present, an observer, a listener, I try to understand the world we are a part of, without getting too much involved or ingrained in the affairs of society.

January 11, 2021 | Photography & Art