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Seeing,
in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your
intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject
matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the label of
things and discovering the remarkable world around you.
'Photography
and the Art of Seeing' Freeman Patterson
We
took a walk with a difference the other day. A leader who walked
behind, choose your own path, lots of time, walk individually, meet
you at the big stump for lunch.
As
leader, I was presenting a workshop in photography as a way of seeing
and recording nature more acutely, and that included finding one's
own path.
We
tend to assume that a study of nature includes observing, recording
and communicating in a scientific manner – kinds of rocks, flora
and fauna etc. and that is a powerful way of
understanding the world, but I added a First Nations perspective as
well, that for thousands of years along this coast people understood
the deeper meanings through stories passed down orally: this piece of
coastline, a water spirit curled up against the living land. The rich
and fecund place of the inter-tidal zone.
At our big stump noon stop I reviewed the ideas I had introduced earlier about photography; angle of view, selecting and organizing what will be within the frame, the intensity and direction of the sun and so on. I demonstrated as I went and encouraging others to have a go. Later, as we walked along the coastline to complete our loop around a part of Ruckle Park I encouraged everyone to think and write about their experience later as a way of cementing their perceptions in the same way as they had taken photographs to both explore and record this natural world.
* these are cell phone images.
