I stood there for a solid five minutes trying to find his eyes. No luck.
And he stood there contemplating me, his chum decidedly unimpressed. It was as if I’d asked to take his picture and he’d sheepishly replied, “Meh.”
(ba-dum-dum.)
Have you ever had one of those lovely moments in which you ask permission without speaking, and some momentarily peaceful, still, contented beast cooperates?
He watches a fairground ride and I wonder: what’s he thinking?
Sure, they just lie there in carseat or on floor, less photographically diverse than hopping and squishing and squealing toddlers. But OH! My… the wonder that awaits a patient soul. This Easter Monday, show us your favourite baby-absorbing-world captures – with all the cereal-encrusted cheeks and gummy grins.
Because nothing quite says peace and hope like cheeks like those.
photo by HippyHappyHay
Flickr makes my eyes cross.
In a good way, of course. Eye-crossing world-rocking is what feeds music, art, films, literature—creatives influence enthusiasts who become creatives who influence enthusiasts, each imprinting a new twist on the original until you’re not sure where the muse left off and the student begins.
I’m immensely grateful to Pioneer Woman for her most excellent Photoshop tutorials, sitting two inches from the screen breathing with my mouth open all-like OoooohhNOWIGETIT! …But then everywhere you turn we’re all morphing into replicas, following step-by-step like an army of Verne Troyers to Ree’s Dr. Evil, complete with a chorus of mini-maniacal giggling that we all finally got our hands on the recipe for the Marlboro Man style.
It’s soul food for dry spells, and we love her for it.
But this week I was bewitched by HippyHappyHay’s portrait in our fabulous pool, and went on to admire the gorgeous tones and inventive backgrounds found in her photostream. Ethereal and washed out rather than saturated, delicately evocative rather than high-contrast and grainy. So refreshing next to the unrelenting BAM! BAM! BAM! of my intermediate photofinishing routine, the unchallenged 1-2-3 that I apply like a creature of habit.
And now I’m lit up, all hippyhappy. Still grateful for the generosity of the pioneers, but ripe for something new. So don’t bust my bubble, ‘kay? Don’t say “DUH… that’s just ‘#23 Low Contrast/Vintage’ from Actions-R-Us…”
Let me bask in this apparent differentness.
(Come to think of it, maybe it’s about time I jump on the actions bandwagon. Think so? Do you use actions for instant interestingness? And is it not a contradiction in terms to push a MAKE-IT-UNIQUE! button while everyone else does the same? Isn’t adopting the latest popular pizazz like buying a Toyota—don’t you then just see Toyotas everywhere? Does originality even matter, or is it all just about prettier pictures?)
I digress. Share with us: who’s taught you a thing or two? And who’s inspired you to turn it all upside-down?
Every time I leave the house I give the glass a tap-tap-tap, watch the needle twitch and tell fortunes with as much magic as a ouija board at a seventh grade sleepover party.
The old barometer tells me what weather’s brewing in the atmosphere of this craggy, rocky seashore in a way that’s tactile, romantic—at least compared to the goofy banter and shit-eating grins of the local news.
Often I’ve wondered what it would be like to have a barometer of life. Some leatherbound, vintage typeface and needle that would forecast episodes of catastrophe (premature babies imminent) or achievement (clear skies following credit line payoff) or vice (periods of rum at times heavy, visibility near zero).
The last one’s a joke. I haven’t taken to bottle. Yet.
With a barometer of life I’d at least know when to batten down the hatches, when to hoist up the spinnaker to fly on light and friendly winds.
But knowing all defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Because the whole point of living is trial by fire, to gain heart-bursting perspective through the lens of hindsight—not foresight.
This Monday’s post is courtesy of the lovely Steph, who photographs as a foundation for her illustrative work.
Steph bewitches me with her treehouse ramblings, her eye for super-funky little clothes, her sketches, and her perfectly joyful way of capturing life as a mama to scruffy, inquisitive, rollabout boys.
She writes:
There’s a perfect riparian hike up an open space preserve near the house that pauses at a quarter mile, if you are looking for it, with a set of mossy stairs that lead down to an old pet cemetery.
As I had hoped, he became saturated with the place: jumping off every stone, stomping on every ant, smudging himself into the wet earth, collecting grubby fistfuls of small sticks along the walk. His proud stride, the happy, bouncy swagger he gets when we’re together: it just makes me want to burst. I love it. And, as usual, in anticipation of this display, I brought my camera.
I wish I could sling a camera like the professionals do, working quickly with finesse and understanding the technical aspects of photography, but I simply am too busy trying to capture all of these fleeting moments.
The best photographs I manage to take are those that capture what all mothers adore: acrobatic preschool gestures, the details in terribly food-stained clothes, the paint that gets under fingernails, a mass of bedhead, a noble negative space, the thoughts behind a dark brow or the silence behind an overbite.
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I like to have an image library within the pages of my sketchbook so that I can refer to it for paintings or illustrations. While I have some practice capturing gestures freehand, my photography has been tremendously helpful in compiling studies of their facial proportions so that life-sketching is more fluid.
If I didn’t have the photographs I’d have to make the kids pose, which would interrupt everything.
And by everything, I mean that chaos which is a house of boys: flying Legos, the hiss of supersonic jets, beaming laser blasters and the rubble of broken alien spacecraft. Dirty bare feet on clean white sheets. Questions falling like rain, books everywhere.
The dog chases the stampede, and I follow furiously with my camera.
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This week, show us your little boys. Let’s see your favourite puddle-jumpers, sandcastle-stompers and mischief-hunters. TAG! You’re it.
Paddling through the Broken Islands we saw mussels as big as footballs and starfish with uncountable legs and bodies as wide as our kayaks. A second sun shone up from the ocean floor, illuminating underwater forests of giant kelp that swayed and entangled, a slick, glowing green.
After a day of chasing whales and surfing bottleneck currents we’d choose a beach on one island or another, pull our boats onshore. Then we’d tuck into cold beer and sit by a fire until rosy, cleansing woodsmoke permeated every pore. Watched by thousand year-old cedars and hemlocks that dwarfed their tiny outposts, with roots like fingertips wrapped around the edge of the sand.
It was in this sand that the skull of the sea otter shone bleached white, part-sculpture and part-ghost. Proud, unapologetic, not a whiff of self-pity. I felt like I’d been singled out to receive this gift.
He lives in the kitchen, a different spot every day for how much I pick him up to feel his prickly smoothness in my hands. He reminds me of that place I escape to in my head—the sound of my bow slicing through swell, of the heat in my arms taking me deeper into the peace of where there are no people.
Show us something precious to you—something unexpected, discovered and clung to as an artifact of some fabulous epic or episode. Let’s get through the February doldrums by sharing a few tall tales, eh?
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Addendum: I should clarify—as great as they are, tall tales are not limited to beach finds. Show us any inanimate object in your home that tells a story—a first edition of a favourite book someone gave you, your mother’s handwritten recipe cards, a vase bought in your adventuring days from a street vendor in some exotic locale. Or maybe just the first macaroni-and-glue artwork given to you by a child. Tell! Show! Anything goes.
The husband, too often, is trumped by sons and daughters. Conversation is reduced to tokens of business such as
Hello. We got another power bill and did you remember to pick up more milk and I forgot to take out the recycling again and that cheese isn’t supposed to be blue and watch out, that’s a poopy sock. Goodnight.
Bleary-eyed we stagger through parenthood, aware of each other only peripherally. In front of the camera he exists as child-carrier, slide-catcher and armpit-tickler, captured in bits and pieces alongside headlining cereal-splattered cheeks and tricycle prowess.
I’m still in a state of shock that, with a baby and a toddler in the house, a marriage with this man takes effort—effort in the way of just remembering to just be with each other and laugh, and talk, and look at each other straight in the eyes, the way we used to.
This photo is who Justin was, before. May I be so bold? RAWR.
And after? There is none yet. Not of this classic magnitude. But there will be. Post-Valentine, I’m determined: a portrait of him as himself, rather than as child-prop.
Want to join me?
Peel your camera away from the kids. Introduce us to yours, and tell us about him (or her)—the before, or the after—just your partner, no one else. Share a picture of what made (and makes) you love: a stance, a grin. Or the way he wraps his hand around the paddle of a canoe, an extension of his arm, as natural as if he were born to this place.
A newborn fern reaches, twists to bask in the single beam of sun that penetrates the rainforest canopy, a spotlight.
Dew on leaf and nectar supped by butterfly. Sweat on the glass brim of a summer martini. With the macro lens on my 1970s-era Pentax I was dwarfed by worlds within worlds, transported hands-first into shimmering giantness, enveloped. Wrapped in more life and light and vividness than I’d ever known existed—that which could only be discerned by getting really. close. up.
Happily engulfed by the otherworld inside a macro lens, the big outside mattered less.
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I don’t have so much diversity to offer these days. Not what’s botanical and artistic and profound aside from what lives and dances and giggles inside these four walls, this small house on the edge of a seasalty coast, these two boys, this mama’s life.
So week after week it’s the first kid, then the second. Then the first, then the second. And I’m sorry for that and feel entirely humbled by all of you and the gorgeousness in the pool but 1) there is an ice-storm outside, oppressive and bone-chilling and not so welcoming for baby-laden photo excursions; and 2) in the effort of capturing my boys I find the same vividness, the same meditation as before.
These days, I’m macro-less. But camera pointed at these faces, the wonder returns.
Wishing I could crawl in between those eyelashes, turn around and see from his vantage point how the world looks, as he studies it.
You don’t mind, do you?
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This week, I’d love to see your favourite macro shots. Tide me over until light and weather and childcare and disposable income and a good deal on a lens conspire to set me loose among the dewy ferns again.
Gimme a dose, willya?
Seth Godin talks of the soul expansion to be found by “leaning into” problems. To that I’ll add—as taught to me by my three-year-old—world expansion is to be found by leaning into what’s new and unfamiliar.
This is the dynamic I see here, in this near-disregarded frame: the crackling in the air between Evan and a talking parrot as Justin attempts to peel him away for the next adventure on our City Day list.
It’s closer to rule-of-nines than rule-of-thirds, I scoff, the subject almost completely off the canvas. Shoot.
But it speaks to me, because it’s… just Evan, perfect Evan.
To me, the unconventional eye has the best luck capturing how humans knock around in the world and bump up against one another. Like looking at a famed painted portrait and seeing a person true-to-form, fine enough, versus looking at an abstract painting and almost hearing the sound of its cadence.
As photographers this crackling surprises us, wills us to notice it. We can’t plan it, force it. This palpable push-pull force allows itself to be evidenced like the fuzzy outlines of some glowing aura in the background of an old tintype. It makes an appearance when it chooses, an unexpected, delightful guest.
StefanieRenee caught the leap of faith that is a second pregnancy, the imminent sharing of flesh and love. Call Me Karate shares a little boy and all his unspoken questions. Straightforward enough, that shot—but it vibrates. Shama-lama Mama shows us the carrying of a child, the walking through life burdened, compared to before—and basks in it. Denim caught my eye tonight with her phenomenal starkness, like a dream. It should be a relatively ordinary shot (person standing in field), but that person is saying something to me. I’m still trying to figure out what it is I’m hearing…
How about you? In the comments, link to shots that speak to you—yours or someone else’s—the quirky, the nearly-deleted, the inexplicably extraordinary, the happy accidents. Show us magic, crackling.
Back in the day I’d roam the streets with my 25-year-old Pentax K-1000, desperate to find something INTERESTING.
I loved those photography courses. Photojournalism, darkroom, abstract. It seems so far away to me now, the prospect of self-betterment just for the fun of it, sitting here typing one-handed, jiggling baby number two.
These assignment shots make me hopelessly nostalgic, sniffing the five-year-old fumes of the fantasy of disposable time. Wandering, subject-hunting, answerable to no one. All snow-capped peaks and Chinatown scenes and whales from my kayak as opposed to today’s snotty noses and ‘spwinkle’-laden birthday cakes. Sure, I didn’t have inspiration like this. Or this. But I sure do miss those creative excursions.
I remember lying on my stomach on a pile of rusty metal garbage in the rain, stalking. Chin to the pavement, facing the gloomy underside of a shipbuilding trailer on the North Vancouver docks, waiting for a pack of feral cats to trust me enough to let me document their scruff and scrappiness.
Not much different with people, come to think of it.
Accosting passerby, trying to explain why I found them interesting, somehow, just as they were.
