picture me a word

Some days there just aren't any words. Today there were only images in my head. I stopped to take the first photos before I reached home. I felt a driving urge to capture what I saw with my camera. It started with my iPhone.  The road home, the sun setting through the trees, the light casting long shadows on the road. Another day drawing to a close. So I attempted once again to capture the moments of my life, and my world, with the snap of my shutter.

I shot several photos, using several settings, hoping to find a way to perfectly express what my eyes were drinking in. 

Finally I returned to my car and drove home.  I thought I was going to go download the photos, but I had to let the dogs run, so I decided to switch cameras and grabbed Big Girl at that point and headed to my little corner of the world.  While the dogs ran circles around me, I was looking.  At everything from the sky above me to the dirt underneath my feet.  Then I began to snap the shutter.

*An aside here: I think because I was an artist first, I am hypersensitive to the things I see.  When I hang my camera around my neck, I look at the world through different eyes.  I've spent so many years composing and painting canvas, that it is just one step up to compose a photograph.  Thank goodness for digital cameras, because rather than try to set up and take one perfect photo, I try to convey something in its natural state, whether I am photographing people or nature.  So I snap lots of photos.  Each one a bit different.  Each one with another perspective.

So I looked and snapped, and snapped some more.  And what I realized while I took these photos, was the blessing of nature around me.  There are no mistakes in nature.  All around me was perfection.

The perfection of a tangle of grape vines against the blue sky.  The perfection of a rose in full bloom.  The perfection of collards in the garden, gone to seed and blooming profusely, with the hum of bees lifting from the bright yellow flowers.  And the perfection of an old well bucket and pulley hanging silently from a peeling frame, patiently waiting to be put to use once again.

Perfection.  Captured in a split second.  Shared with you today.  Drink it in.  Savor it.  Because the second it took me to capture this, is a second that will never exist again.

Except in my photographs.