So…I’m walking out of the beer store with a bottle of wine. Well…the beer and wine store…and liquor store…with a bottle of wine. And I already have my picture for today, a picture of pipes and ventilators and all this written stuff about sewers and power lines and what’s going on underneath those manhole covers. I’ve seen people dance on those, not suspecting for a moment what nameless horrors they might be awakening.
Now, where was I?
Walking out of the booze store with a bottle of wine. And I see something. Something beautiful. Been seeing a lot of that since my satori. (Hey…if you’re feeling down and life’s not making much sense…hop in a Jimmy and drive around places you haven’t seen in a while. Works for me.) So I think…no, Biff, you already have your picture for today…sewers…pipes…mean stuff. But, hey, my camera’s in my car. And my tripod. So I rush over to my car and there’s goddam truck parked on top of it…but I can still get into my trunk. Cool.
A few minutes later, I’ve got my camera set up right about where cars have to drive around me, but I’m wearing a white sweater so I’m blocking out the cars. Oh yeah…did I mention…it’s dark. I’m taking pictures at slow shutter speeds using my remote release totally unaware of the van driving right at me until he has to swerve at the last minute and I wave to the driver in gratitude for not damaging my beautiful camera.
This guy walks up to me and asks what I’m seeing that’s so important that I’m standing in traffic outside a booze store to get the shot. I mumble a bunch of gibberish about the light, the branches and other shit I can’t remember because I’m what’s really in this shot that I have such a hard on to capture.
When I get home…safely…un-run over…I stick the card in the card port and let Lighthouse open the files.
And I’m so fucking disappointed. Yeah, I wrote “fucking.” First time in the project. But that’s exactly how I felt. I think I swore at God for misleading me. So…I stared at the best of the images wondering what the hell it was that gave me that hard on.
And then I blew the image up, just on a hunch, and there it was. I cropped the picture down to it.
And once again…I saw beauty.
Lesson learned: Always wear a white sweater when you’re taking pictures in the dark. In a traffic lane. Outside a booze store. In the dark.
Silence Says It All 