Never leave home without it: your pocket Sony or your iPhone, not because you’re expecting a call but because it can take pictures. I don’t mean pictures as documentation of facts, or because you’re planning a photography exhibit, but as an exercise in seeing. Pure and simple.
When you’re winding through your neighborhood on your power walk, you’ll notice the clever things people do with their entrances and shrubs and you’re reminded of how your own domicile will never make it into Architectural Digest. Your eye is outer-directed.
Now try an alley. Notice that you have the place to yourself and your seeing becomes more intense, more internal. When you veer off into an alley, you’ve turned off your “certified beauty” sensor. 
Your eye searches for shapes and juxtapositions. Mmmm, garbage cans. But you don’t see garbage or think garbage, you just see the shapes and the negative spaces. Click.
What you zoom in on teaches you something about how you see. When I review my photos, I notice a repeated composition. What to do with that? Puzzle over it, go deeper, work with it.
My ankle-weighted walking shots are composed in a sweating hurry. Some of them invite cropping in Photoshop, that fabulous tool for nuanced seeing. Crop that shot! Crop it again and again until you see form with only a sigh of memory of the garbage can. Ahhh!
And then you can flip it and notice that it’s better that way. Ah-hah.————————————————————-
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
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