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Friday Slide Show: An Obsession
28 June 2019
It's an obsession, this photography thing. That's what we were thinking when we finished this series. And, for that matter, when we started it. An obsession.
It's fashionable to call things passions these days. You have to be passionate, you'll read in every dull office job listing you come across. Really, someone just wants you to work non-stop for peanuts.
If you're passionate, it seems to us sitting here with our feet on the desk, you are passionate about everything. Life itself, in short.
Otherwise what you've got is an obsession.
We had dropped Joyce off at the medical building to finally get the prescription from the pharmacy that had been put off pending the results of one test or another, relief always a few more days away.
We looked out the window, away from the little screen on our phone, to clear our mind so something could pop into it.
We circled the streets in the neighborhood looking for a place to park while we waited for her to call, telling us she'd escaped with the goods. And, after a few times around, during which we met all the neighbors, we spied a just-vacated spot and slipped into it.
We had, it turned out, an hour to kill. But we had plenty to do, of course.
There was the afternoon site surfing to do, looking for news and items for the Horn. And there was our own prescription to refill before we ran out of pills. We could do that without taking off our seat belt, too.
Anything else? We looked out the window, away from the little screen on our phone, to clear our mind to see if something would pop into it.
But nothing popped into it other than our obsession. We saw bold but frayed white letters painted on the street and the odd mix of buildings at the corner and we wondered if that shot would look better as a horizontal or vertical composition.
There was nothing for it but to line up the shot with, well our phone was all we had with us.
Then through the windshield we saw the utility wires running overhead against the blue sky and imagined how the wide angle lens would dramatize the vanishing point, so we scrunched up toward the windshield to line up that shot.
And there was something about the view out the side window that attracted us, too. The tree trunk, for one thing, that was sitting next to the telephone pole. So we composed the scene framed by the interior of the car.
We saw where this was going. South, West, North, what about East?
So we got downtown lined up in the rear view mirror and shot that. And the side mirror, too. Just to have a choice.
An obsession, we said to ourselves, putting the phone down. We don't even have a camera and we're taking pictures. We must be mad.
But you be the judge.
