Shutter Sisters

Focus

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Throughout the day, we move up and down along our journey. Passing from light to dark and back to light again. Sometimes when the planets align, when the sun is nearing its descent, I’m given a gift called ‘time of day’. I sit half in and half out of the kitchen door. My bare feet on the back step while my son plays in the dirt with his trucks. He lays there all Zen like, lost in his own world while I sit with camera in hand as dinner simmers on the stove. The late afternoon sunlight streams in, and I can’t help to think that life couldn’t get much better than this. The closeness we have while in a different headspace from each other is most magical. I learn of him, of all his details while behind my camera. Of course some days, my camera is used as a shield or filter for true-life realities not so sunny. But on an afternoon like this, my camera is the magnifying glass. And the beauty I find is that he is willing to let our worlds gently mingle. We brush up against each other at this time of day. When I am mother/photographer/dinner burner/chore slacker/multi-tasker. And he is the barefoot boy child zooming trucks over clumps of dirt.

As he grows into himself, I find myself a mere observer. Not completely understanding the language or the rules of his boy planet. Sometimes I inch up close to him with my camera to capture this life of his that is only his. This breath as it slips and slides and grows before my very eyes. Wanting to remember it all overwhelms me. And so I focus. I have come to learn by taking photos throughout my days and weeks that what I’m trying to preserve is my perception of how life is. What I want to preserve is the way the moment finds my heart. While looking through my photo archives, I discover that i mainly focus on sunlight: how it feels splashing down across his shoulders, how it appears to me on afternoons like this. Today I focus on the leaf he discovers and offers up to me on a rock pedestal, “Keep it safe for me, Momma.” This is his gift to me, and it’s more precious than I ever knew. He gives me this time, this memory, and this space to document it as I see it.

There’s something magical viewing life through someone else’s camera lens. Most often it’s a stranger… a person who captures something so universal, that you instantly feel as if you know them. There’s kinship in the subject of the photo, the angle, the color, or the focus that speaks directly to you. This sense of familiarity is what keeps me coming back for more. I find myself at the doorstep of Shutter Sisters every morning with my cup of chai. I’m so grateful for this space to share my own today. So, share with me a bit of yourself, will you? What is your focus? The motion, the solitude. the calm, the chaos? Leave some links and share your focus, so we may learn a bit about yourself as well.

Photo and post courtesy of today’s Honorary Sister/Guest Blogger Meredith Winn (aka camera shy momma).

Exclusive Shutter Sisters Discount

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While the Shutter Sisters garden couldn’t flourish without the energy of our community, it wouldn’t necessarily be this awesome without our software and hosting provider, Squarespace. So we thought we’d show them some love (and you!) by sharing this Shutter Sisters exclusive-discount.

If you use this link you’ll get a free 30 day trial and 10% off if you upgrade to a paid plan. If for any reason it asks for a code when you upgrade, use sista.

Note: The signup page on that link defaults to a photography/portfolio layout but you can switch it in Appearance.

projecting memories

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My dad would lift me under the armpits, hoist me above his head so I could scramble onto the canal platform high above the deck of our boat. Then the same for my older brother. We’d find the gigantic wooden lever and push like vikings aboard a rowing ship, both of us, until it gave way to open the gates.

We’d watch as water burst through in streams, pressing against the expanding crack, filling the throughway. Mom and dad’s smiling faces rose above the wall and past our feet as the boat emerged from the crevice and we’d climb on board again. We meandered through northern England and Scotland this way, Easter break explorers.

Gliding under arched stone bridges hundreds of years old, so low we had to press ourselves to the deck to clear the underside of mossy rock. Along waterways lined with tall grasses and walking paths, generations of feet pressing the earth into a smooth, winding line for docking and towing and the stretching of legs. It was a rosy-cheeked adventure within an adventure, frosty mornings spent wrapped in fishermens’ knits and puffy jackets. British camping, it was, pastoral and gentle.

For a four-year-old with a mop, swabbing the decks is as close to heaven as you can get—second only, perhaps, to single-handedly operating a canal.

I say I’ll never forget that year we lived on a busy street in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Not cohesive remembering, but … well, like snapshots. But how much of that is me, and how much has been imprinted on my brain in the dark with a projection screen?

I adore slides. My mom and dad took thousands of of them, kept to this day in stacks of catalogued metal boxes at their house. Australia 1969. July-August 1979. Bedford 1987-88. Every few months we’d beg them to fill the Kodak carousel, unroll the soft, white screen, take us through another episode of our collective history.

Digital photography is all about blogs, flickr, unlimited gluttony. In a good way, but still—compared to the economy necessitated by film, does the digital medium dilute photography’s magic with sheer volume? Can files on a laptop ever immerse our kids in vividness, saturate them with memory in the gloriously tactile way of slides and albums?

There’s nothing like a loaded carousel to tranform photographs into an occasion. For me, a pile of sharpie-marked CDs simply cannot compete.

What do you do to make the most of your family photography in the digital age? How will you keep your own adventures alive the way our parents used to, with dinner on fold-up TV tables in the cosy, flickering dark?

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The low-res scan of this slide (and of those on flickr) doesn’t whatsoever do it justice. Apologies. All the photos are courtesy of my mom, who tells me she took them with an SLR in her hands for the first time. The drippy nose is courtesy of yours truly.