It's just a little fog . . .

by Kim

"Sometimes when I first wake up, I feel like I'm walking around in a fog. That's when

I usually go and unplug the fog machine. Geez, who turned that thing on?"

- Jared Kintz

Geez is right . . . my brain has been a bit foggy lately. It's been a bit difficult to get my words out in the right order, and it's also how I felt when I remember the first time I tried to duplicate the manual settings on my camera after they were set by a very nice man at my first sunrise.

So you can imagine that the next time I went out there was a lot of frustration and the only thing I think that kept me from giving up was that I was out with my camera in the presence of things I loved. But I guess it was all this frustration that ultimately helped me really start to figure it all out, and well, I'm still figuring it out as I go. I was turning dials and had no knowledge of what a correct exposure was, had never heard of aperture priority or rule of thirds. It would be pretty safe to say that I had not read my camera manual or any other book for that matter. And wow, you can imagine my ahha moment when I finally got my very first photography book "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. Sooo . . .that's what that circle and those little lines are for in my view finder!! 

I think no matter how or where we all start out, foggy would be a good word to describe our learning process which ever that might be. And sometimes when we are first learning something we can tend to over think a little too much on rules and techniques and correct exposures to the exclusion of the equally important mood or feelings we are trying to convey. We can get so caught up in how our photos "should" look,  that we constrict ourselves with expectations.

When we let expectations get in the way, we in some ways reject a world that lies beyond our own immediate vision and our own creativity. And this is something I learned all too well while on our first vacation in nine years this past summer. So many expectations of how it should all be {perfect} that when it started to go a different direction disappointment set in. It seems the more I expected the more I lost my ability to be open to the moment at hand, and to be fully engaged.

It would seem that life and photography are so very similar in our approach to them and in both there needs to be an equal amount of consciousness and of letting go.