Available Light

A couple of weeks back I set myself the task of photographing a bumblebee in flight. This was not because I was particularly interested in bumblebees, but because the task was difficult. Bumblebees move quickly and erratically, they are hairy and thus have ill defined edges, they are striped which makes them contrasty and thus photographically challenging and their faces have black features on a black background, ditto. Good photography is about technique more than it is about gear, and I wanted to improve my technique. Especially, I wanted to try my hand at macrophotography, which I haven't done much of before. So, I've spent a lot of time watching bumblebees through my viewfinder. I generally take a few shots, maybe 100 or so. Then I look at them on the camera's LCD screen and delete those with obvious and fatal flaws (bad focus and motion blur mostly)which is usually about 30% of them. Next I load them onto my computer and give them a second, more critical cull, del...

So I retired, and although I have an interesting  part time job, my life stopped being shaped by the agendas of other people. All the stuff that kept me so busy for so many years was suddenly over. I suppose it could have been an unnerving experience, but it wasn't. I found my life not so much shapeless, as reshaped. My family gives life much of its new form, but as the old life wafted down into nothingness, like a hot air balloon after someone turns the gas off, I've found two things whose importance, for how I now am in the world, grows by the day. One of these is meditation, with all it's attendant disciplines and theories and theologies. The other is taking photographs. Prayer and photography. Mostly these are aspects of the same thing. Over the years I think I've developed a reasonable "eye". I know a good composition when I see one, just don't ask me to define it for you. I have a good understanding of photographic principles and equipment and...