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Seeing the Light

I have it on good authority that these flowers are primulas. They're actually very small. I was taken with their audacious colors. 

Two young fish are swimming happily along when they pass an old fish. "Good morning," says the old fish, "lovely water today, isn't it?" Once the old fish was well out of earshot one young fish turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?"
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There's a change which happens to every photographer at some stage. They begin to see light. Before that they see objects - people or hills or bees or birds -that are potential subject matter, and of course they still do that, but there is something else as well. They see the light: its direction and strength; its colour; whether it is direct or reflected or refracted or absorbed; the way it takes on the characteristics of whatever it has bounced off. They notice that when hitting film or a photographic sensor, reflected light  behaves differently than direct light because it is polarised. They get pretty adept at estimating the amount of light in various parts of a scene. They begin to notice the gradations of shadows - that is, the places where light is absent.
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Of course, all people with functioning eyes do this also, all the time, but it is not usually done consciously. Unbeknown to us our brains take in all this information about light and process it for us, seamlessly and quickly. This is why for new photographers the images they get out of their cameras are often so disappointing: they are simply not aware of the extent to which their brains have been processing the information around them, and therefore the extent to which they aren't actually seeing what is there. Cameras catch the light and spit it back out, presenting, along with the things we thought we were photographing, all the bits and pieces our brains have screened out, all the imbalances of light which our brains have evened up, and all the odd disjoints of perspective our brains have corrected. Photography is about teaching yourself to see what is there. That is why I love it. That is why for me it is a spiritual practice.
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Today I sat in a lovely room with  a dozen or so other spiritual directors and in the course of conversing with them, a penny dropped for me. This aspect of photography - learning to see the light - is a metaphor for the role of spiritual direction. People come to us with the objects of their life: the events and relationships which form the structure of  how they are in the world. And our concern is not so much those objects, as the  light which surrounds them. Our task is learning to see, and helping the other to see the light, which surrounds all of us, all the time: that light whose omnipresence renders it invisible, but which, when seen, can never again be unseen.

Photo: Nikon D750. Micro Nikkor 105 f2.8. @ f16. 1/125 iso100 Processed in Adobe Lightroom.

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