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| Story ID: | 3650 |
| Written by: | Carol J Garriott (bio, link, contact, other stories) |
| Organization: | home/retired |
| Story type: | Musings, Essays and Such |
| Location: | All Over Many USA |
| Year: | 2008 |
| Person: | Carol Garriott |
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About the only thing I like better than taking pictures is talking about them. There are no two ways about it, I love heading out with the camera on the hunt for photo ops. Whether I’m on vacation in some delightfully beautiful spot, traveling back and forth to the job, or sitting on my back deck with the morning coffee, I’m hard put to avoid grabbing the camera when something interesting is noticed. I’ve been told I notice the oddest things! Well, it’s an odd world in a lot of ways. Sometimes the goal is merely to document what you are seeing, to share your fascinating travel locations, or preserve an event or occurrence. The trick, however, is to move a “documentation” into more of a work of art, not always easy. I’m still working on honing this skill. Vacations to exotic places can provide an album full of beautiful documentations. Interesting, but lacking “life.” An effort in this direction provided a couple of shots from a trip to Jamaica that I’m pleased with. Shooting through the deck railing nicely framed a sailing ship that had moored in the Bay near my villa in Ocho Rios. I must say I shot that ship from every possible vantage point from morning to night during the few days it was there. Early morning sun supplied the best light, to brighten the masts against a pale sky. Another scene in Jamaica featured one-person boats with vivid colors in the sails. I tried several viewpoints, but decided I liked this one best, as it included the curve of the beach, incredible background water color, line of trees, and a catamaran bobbing offshore. It would have been great to have a sailor preparing to launch, but the immediate area was totally devoid of such and I had to go with a more or less still-life. An aspect of photography I learned the hard way is to quickly get the shot when it appears, and THEN fiddle around for perhaps a BETTER shot. On a trip to Colorado, friends and I decided it would be great to watch the sunset from the Royal Gorge, and arranged to arrive late in the afternoon. It became partly cloudy, but the sun was breaking through most of the time. I got excited when, as the sun was sinking, the shadow of the bridge was dramatically displayed on the side of the gorge. We had walked out a ways on the bridge, and I’m investigating composition, fiddling with settings, deciding what viewpoint to take, when a moving cloud came across the setting sun, and like a giant hand, shoved that shadow into oblivion. If I had just grabbed one shot and fiddled later! Ah yes, always be ready . . . and QUICK! About that always being ready -- Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time! During a trip to Hawaii, we were prowling the shops when I spotted a couple of the guys in our group goofing off in the hat section. They were in the midst of trying on hats as I got off some shots, and one of them cut his eyes toward me just as I clicked the shutter. An amazing candid resulted! I'm not above orchestrating a scene, even setting up a “story.” Another trip with friends had us spending a day with sand and surf. After a lunch on the beach, we had had our fill of photographing seashells and sand crabs, and decided to go for drama. We had picked up a bag of trash littering the area. One of the group pulled out an empty beer bottle, tossed it onto an untracked dune, and then dropped to his knees, crawling toward it as if he were dying of thirst, seeing a possibility of slacking it. Then there's the serendipity of when I'm going for one thing and I get a great shot of something different altogether. Glancing out my condos’ sliding glass doors late one March afternoon, I was taken with sunshine behind new tree leaves, highlighting them to a brilliant spring green. This was back in the days before digital, and I only had a few photos left on my roll of film. Stepping out on the deck, I shot right and left until I had one frame remaining. I glanced around, anxious to make the most of it, and for the first time saw the tableau of shadows on my little narrow deck. The sunshine-highlighted leaves turned out less than stellar, but Deck Shadows won first place in the county fair. |
