lens

click and enlarge. the camera wants you to.

the sweetie got us a new birthday camera. because our birthdays are right up next to each other. now, i love the cameras and we have most forms of the technology from start to finish. pinhole to digital. but i am a lazy photographer. i have been uninterested in learning light and shutter speed and apertures. the sweetie does not believe this at all and so the birthday camera arrives with enough dials and buttons and lights to maneuver a space shuttle through a fairly sophisticated obstacle course.

he tells me about all the camera words, about how to make a dark room light and how to slow down a speeding bird. i do not listen. i set the button to auto and the camera rears up like an angry horse. this is not what cameras do and i am surprised. the camera is unhappy. it refuses to cooperate. my photos are dull. uninspired. mean. i recall something the sweetie said about opening the eye of the camera. letting in more light. making decisions about things. i try it, reluctantly. petulantly. i sigh and use the viewfinder which does not give me an automatic practice version of my photo before i shoot. my face is up against the little rubber eyepiece and there are numbers in there all along the bottom. the camera tells me things. it wants to help, but i have to do a little my own self.

i am not perfect and this is disappointing. all my photos are a little soft. i take countless pictures of swimming ducks and floating ducks and flying ducks. all of them are just smudges against sky and water.

 the sweetie changes lenses. he gives me an old lens from a real live film camera. i now point frankenstein's monster camera at everything. the two pieces communicate in broken images. halting. unsure. everything becomes a guess and attempt and another guess and attempt. the sweetie says i will get a feel for it.

he gives me a lens longer than my own arm that pulls birds right out of the sky and turns water droplets into whole worlds. at first i cannot see anything through the massive lens. i cannot take a picture of any object in the same room with me. not even in the same yard. i try to show the massiveness of mountains and get three trees huddled together. i do not understand the lens and its awful grabbiness. until a snail moseys by. slime-bellied and slow-moving, he is trying to figure out a flower. and the camera does what it does which is let me see right up inside the snail. it scoots up so i can see the dark lines of the thing's blood or maybe his optic nerve. stalk inside a stalk. 

i learn about depth of focus. i learn that the long lens has a very short depth of focus. probably. that is likely what i learn. two scraggly weeds living right next to each other cannot both be in the same shot at the same time with the same focus. no way. i learn that it is pretty to have one tiny thing sharp as a needle in front of the rest of the soft focus world. 

the sweetie shows me how to use the pretty lens. he catches two bees considering the same flower. he gets one of those same bees seconds later shaking grains of pollen- actual grains of pollen- into the air. each grain flying loose on nothing. floating out there. all of them separate dots of honey. 

i try to do things the camera doesn't understand. it is upset when i try to focus on a fish hook dangling in front of some roses but after twenty seven attempts, the lens bends to my will. and then i run wild. i capture every flower, every snail, every butterfly and bee in my little section of the world. nature is no match for me. i capture things i can't even see.

but my photos still are a little soft. i am not yet able to frame an image, think about light, dial everything in and then click without something slipping a little. something gives every time. birds still fly just a bit faster than my finger can hit a button. i am better with unmoving flowers and slow-moving snails. but the sweetie, as always, is right. i am smitten. i click the shutter when i exhale like a sniper.

i will not throw over the pinhole camera sitting on the kitchen table in front of four packs of polaroid film. i will not always want so many choices. but this new camera, with so many lenses and gadgets and buttons and dials is not what i thought it was. it is not a set of rules. it is not a new pile of ways to be wrong. it may be more choices than i'm ready for just yet but i will figure it out.  i am learning to see things with new eyes.