Thursday, April 20, 2017

Walking into Nature. ( with the Trail and Nature Club)







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. 








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