A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
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24 January 2020
The day we visited our optometrist, we stopped by Yerba Buena Gardens to take a few photos of Revelation, the second largest monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the U.S.
We never have enough photos of it. And very few that we like. It's a difficult shoot.
For one thing, you can't get an overview of the thing. It's too large, too tall and too wide.
For another, some of it is in a cavernous darkness and a good deal of it is splashing your camera or misting your lens.
And for still one more, the angles are challenging. Even the Upright tool, which we mostly didn't bother with in this series, can't straighten them out.
It's 26 years old now so you'd think we'd have figured it out. What we figured out was that it's a difficult shoot.
It's a difficult shoot.
So we thought we'd take a different approach this time.
This time, we thought we'd take you on a walk from the north side around the front, slipping behind the falls, and then up to the reflecting pool on top. You should be able to get a sense of the scale of the fountain from that "walk."
But we also thought we'd focus on the details a bit more. So there are more closeups are tighter crops than there are those impossible overviews.
So even though we've published photos of Revelation before, these are new.
The eagle-eyed will observe that the water itself ends up (as you see it in the beginning) in a quiet pool. Which mirrors how it starts at the top in the infinity reflecting pool.
Only the torrents pounding over the edge of the reflecting pool depict power. And that power is merely the power of righteousness.
Oh, the optometrist is always glad to see us. No cataracts, beautiful optic nerves, no glaucoma. He laughs about what he calls our supervision and tells us we can discern detail most people can't.
He leans back on the counter, crosses his arms and tells us we are very fortunate with the health of our eyes.
That revelation humbles us. We know we are blessed. And not with just our eyesight.
We blessed to live in a country where what's right has the force of those torrents in the fountain. And where, on reflection, we know we are not lost.