Photography Philosophy: A Lily in the Storm

I had trouble falling asleep last night.  Matt had conked out by 9:30, having battled fatigue all week long as he hammered away at the pile of legal messes his soldiers had created for him. He snored not-so-lightly as I waited for sleep to come, finishing out a disc of How I Met Your Mother, and mind wandering to and fro, comparing the person I was two years ago to the person I am now, how different I thought my life would be now.  At some point, I gave up on nodding off to one of Barney's long lists of rules or 83% statistics, and rolled onto my side, closing my eyes and willing the sheep to fly across my cranium.  I dreamt I was photographing a large plain, a wide expanse of tall grasses, a storm raging in the distance.  For whatever reason, the spot I set up my tripod was right in front of a callilily.  Must have been a stubborn little bastard to survive in a dry plain, but who's to question the wanderings of my subconscious?  I saw the expanse as if through a camera lens, adjusting the depth of field and allowing the autofocus to confuse itself between the darkness of the storm on the horizon, and the white of the calilily in the foreground.

I could write a six page philosophy about life and tie it to photography any day of the week.  I'm a master of babble (suck it Mumford and Sons!)  Not so surprisingly, I frequently think of at least a dozen philosophy of photography posts to write about simply while running through my facebook feed, or perusing the headlines every morning.  Granted, I would probably get off a wee bit off topic and at some fateful moment, wander back into the oblivion of a "point" before, oddly exhausted and satisfied, click "Publish," lean back onto the couch and sigh... before then going back to re-read and edit the post six times to make it worthy of linking to Facebook and Twitter.

Hiking in the woods of the South Carolina Foothills, Thanksgiving 2011. © Heather Cortright 2011.

Lately, I've been trying to limit my blog posts to something more essential, and, because life has been batch after batch of lemonade in the last few months, it's been difficult to focus outside of my own struggles with this whole "positive attitude perspective."  It's not that I've allowed purple dinosaurs to take up residence in my brain, with singing Koom-bye-ah and holding hands and hugging trees and whatnot; it's just that life is a little easier to pursue when I'm finding the silver linings, and being happy with the simplicities that make every day a little easier.  The less-is-more concept.  So every morning, when I get angry reading the ignorance and close-minded posts of my peers, when I'm forced to change the passwords of my e-mail accounts, and monitor my bank accounts because some bored selfish computer nerd in Romania decided to invest time in breaking into my computer so they could spam my friends and family, I start to rant, imagining a post stretching into a rambling abyss, angry at the world for it's idiocy, etc.

The eye falls on the brightest part of an image.  Rites of Passage Ceremony, Fort Knox, KY, July 2011.

Then I have to calm myself down.  I have to focus on the good things, letting my depth of field slip outside of the limited range of negative space, and refocus on the beautiful detail in the bigger picture.  Readjusting the aperture to let the negative space blur.  See, one of the beautiful things about photography is that you can control where the eye falls.  You can decide, as the photographer, what the focal point of the image is.  In my dream, I could have picked up the tripod, moved it a foot to the left, eliminating the flower from the frame, and focus a long depth of field on the approaching clouds.  Or, I could shorten the depth of field, allowing the haunting light of a wide aperture illuminate the bud, the darkness blurring into a beautiful contrast behind it.  Or, even still, I could set up a fill flash on the white petals, close up the aperture, and click the shutter, capturing this gorgeous scene of a single soldier of nature, standing out before a horrific tempest.  In the latter option, it doesn't matter that the entire shot is in focus.  The f/22 stop would give the viewer all of the information necessary to take in the whole story, yes, but still, the eye falls to the light part of the image.  It's a rule of visual communications.  A light spot surrounded by a dark contrast will be the focal point of the image.  Our eye, with the big, dark, looming negativity in sight, will find the lily to be the most important piece of information.

And, that, friends, is why photography is so beautiful.  It illuminates the human nature in us to withstand the cold.  To focus on the positive space, even amidst the storm.