What do you see?

A few months ago Chris and I went to a local art gallery. The display was of incredibly delicate yet bold weavings. I asked permission to take close-ups of the details — not the entire weaving, just bits and pieces — and was kindly allowed to do so. Hoo ha! Because what I was seeing in the details looked to me like miniature abstract land/seascapes. A rain squall moved across the ocean, waves undulated past, and a headland stood out over a dark sea.

Remember the "art from art" photo walk I did in San Francisco where we extracted bits and pieces, created compositions from huge murals? Well, this is sort of the same thing on a smaller scale.

And isn't that what we're doing with photography in general? We see something, anything, and we extract, create, and present just a section of the whole, whether it's a photograph of Earth from outer space or the eye of a fly in an electron microscope. We've zoomed in on just a part of the whole with the eye of an artist. We see. We think "wow!" We compose. We calculate the light. We tweak our settings. And then we present that "wow" to whoever will be polite enough to look at what we did.

The woman in charge of the gallery that day was quite polite when I showed her my weaving "landscapes" in my viewfinder. Undoubtedly thought I was crazy, but she was very, very polite.

©Carol Leigh, hoping that today you look just a bit longer at something and find that "wow" . . .