Here Now

It is the sweetest time of year with the scent of apple blossoms in the air. This morning I went out with my camera, intent upon making photographs that expressed how I feel about the fleeting beauty of this all too short time of year. It seems to arrive and leave so suddenly. Blink, and you may miss it.

Here, Now

life is in a hurry to blossom and bloom. Flower petals are already beginning to fall. The blossoms may last only a few more days.

I bowed to the trees today before I made photos of their blossoms, thanking them for their beauty and for all that they do for us.

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

   —David Wagoner

I hope that you too have time to bow to the trees and thank them, soaking in their beauty, breathing in the scent of their sweet flowers. Each moment is a gift that we unwrap with attention, presence, and appreciation.

Soft Surprise

My intention when I went out this morning was to make soft closeups using my nifty 50 mm f/1.8 lens. I added an extension tube to the lens so that I could get sweet soft closeups of the blossoms. But I forgot that the last time I had used the lens I had set it on manual focus.

It’s always been a difficult lens to focus so I didn’t think anything of the way it was operating. I moved the camera closer or further away from my chosen subject until it looked in focus, not realizing that the auto-focus I was expecting was not turned on.

It wasn’t until I was almost home that I finally tumbled to the fact that I’d shot all of the photos with auto-focus off and I had not been using the focusing ring to set the focus. Instead I had unknowingly adjusted the distance based on what I was seeing in the view-finder.

Fortunately I was playing with many really soft images and some longer exposures hoping to capture the movement of the blossoms in the breeze. When I realized that I had not been using auto-focus I was afraid that all of my images would be a blurry mess. But I was surprised by the sharpness of some of the images. None of them were totally sharp, but I wasn’t aiming for that given the wide open apertures I was using. And I loved the soft blur that expressed how quickly the blossoms come and go.

Wishing you a beautiful rest of the week my friends.

May you walk in beauty.