Friday, May 18, 2007

Unfurled Ferns

Unfurled Ferns

While we were walking through my favorite garden (the birches) at the Chicago Botanic Garden, my friend Kris asked me as I stopped to kneel down to take this photo, "How do you see these things? I walked right by that."

The answer is...I just do. I guess I look for them consciously, but by now it's so ingrained it doesn't feel like it's a conscious effort. I look at everything as a possible photo op, zooming in small critical details or different angles or whatever it is that I think will draw eyes in. But it's been something I've had to teach myself, and certainly not something I used to before I started my interest in photography. I am astonished every time I go back to Connecticut because it looks different now to my "camera eye" than it did to my regular eye growing up. I didn't notice anything back then!

That said, I know I have a lot more to learn about improving my eye and my composition; I look at other photographers' work over at Flickr every day, and I see the details that they emphasize, which I then also absorb into how I see through my camera eye. It's a wonderful learning tool that way.

Enough musings for today!

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