Waking up at the Texas State Capitol | Day 13 x 33 Sunrises
Well hello there. How are you this Monday morning? What are you up to this week?
I sat out front the Capitol for a good 15-30 minutes this morning waiting for the sun to peek from behind the clouds and just trying to wake up. (I lost track of time ?) After finishing my homemade almond half-caff latte and recording some more voice memos I felt there was enough blood and oxygen pumping in my brain to actually walk successfully on the wedges I decided to wear. At 7am on a Monday?!
So tell me. What's your superpower? How can we change the way we see a situation? Every now and then I'll flip my prime lenses into manual focus and make things intentionally blurry. I've been asked if this was done in post processing and yes you can absolutely do it in post processing (editing the photograph in photoshop, but in my opinion it still can't look as grand. :) In the single class I took in photojournalism school at UT they taught us how to crop in camera. This was back in 2005 on film, so not the whole "spray and pray"; in other words, deliberate shooting, deliberate framing in camera as you're shooting so you're not cropping anything after the fact, mostly shooting with primes, deliberate thought etc etc.
The two photographs below were shot around f1.4, a few seconds after the other and the only editing I did was brighten it and bump up the contrast. Blur was done in camera.
It might appear that this is obvious: there's only soooooo many vantage points to the Capitol. Why even shoot it? Couldn't I just have pulled a few pics off the web? Aren't they alllll the same? I thought this as I was shooting, honestly. "Why did I even have to get out of bed?!" ha
But what I find fascinating is that no matter how many people stand in the exact same vantage point, every single one of us will see something different, see what we want to see, see what we choose to see or maybe even not... maybe see only what our subconscious shows to us.
Here... as I walked in a 45 degree arc around the southeast side of the Capitol I took the following shots. Even moving 100 feet to the left what a difference adding a mere two trees into the shot makes!
So we gather to photograph the same thing, the same location, building, whatever. One of us sees only the trees. The other only sees the architecture of the building. And another the baby squirrel crawling up the tree. How can we see what others see? Can we? Be it even if we're not in their shoes? Can we open up our eyes, our hearts to accept another's vantage point not as incorrect rather merely their vantage point, their life story?
One of my favorite quotes of all time and that's saying something because I like a shit ton of quotes, is from Brandon Stanton of "The People of NYC".
He said: "I always thought people's stories were more important than people's opinions."
Stories. Vantage points. Same darn thing.
Find them. Move your feet. Move your eyes. Move your heart until it's telling you
whether or not we're wearing the same shoes, it all comes back to a beating h e a r t.
Can we be quiet, still enough to listen to ours . . .