Up the Sunbeam

-- It's no secret around here that I love to take pictures, although you might not know it by the infrequency of my photo excursions since I started school. How I miss heading out with my camera to capture whatever my eye is falling in love with wherever I happen to be! The unique beauty in a moment can be what lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner once described as "a fleeting wisp of glory"  (1960)  (C.S. Lewis would have liked that line). It may not even last as long as it takes for the earth to turn one degree of its rotation--the light moves, shadows change, and everything is different in only minutes, even seconds. As amazing a gift as memory is, it walks a delicate dance of deciding what to remember and what to forget . The choices it makes about what it should and shouldn't retain don't always match my wishes . . . and so I take pictures. Without pictures to remember what something really looked like, we lose details, we remember only in pieces.       ...

-- My keyboard has been beckoning. I have been avoiding. My mind is a blank.  A void, empty, white page. The old fear oozes and drips from my workspace in the dining room and I recoil even as I am drawn close.  I deeply long to write, but . . . what if I've had my last idea worth writing for eyes other than my own?  What if I've already shown my last picture worth seeing?  What if my own limitations are all I have to draw from and all my ideas are exhausted? Fear notwithstanding, it is hope that drives me to sit once more, to finger-dance across the keys whose letters are wearing off, to haltingly put the spark of an idea into black-on-white.  It is hope that pulls me like a magnet to grab my camera and go in search of inspiration--IT always finds ME! Fear notwithstanding . . . because ultimately fear never can withstand HOPE. Hope--the silver lining that compels me to KNOW the sun is above and beyond the menacing cloud! Hope--the WILL to TRY befo...

My camera is one of my favorite teachers. When I look through my viewfinder, there is a useful little rectangle in the center called the focus area. As I decide how I want to frame my picture, I can place that focus area indicator on specific parts of the scene and lock in the focus, which will help me make some important decisions. One decision I have to make is to choose the subject of my pictur e. What am I trying to capture? What does the scene in my viewfinder say to me? What best conveys the beauty I see? Is the whole scene important, or is there one detail that I want to highlight. I can dramatically change the way a picture looks just by picking different focal points in the same scene. Another decision is how much of the picture I want to be in sharp focus. For some kinds of photography I may want the whole scene to be uniformly as sharp as possible. For other shots, I may want only one aspect of the scene to be in crystal clear sharpness and leave the re...

The first thing any photographer learns is that taking pictures is all about capturing light. To the youngest child with his first camera it quickly becomes obvious that without light, you can't take a picture. George Eastman once said, "Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography. " There are many things to know about light and the shadows created by its angle and intensity, and I feel like I'll always have more to learn. One thing you discover early is that light changes constantly. From one moment to the next the scene in front of you can change dramatically and is affected by many variables. If you aren't ready to capture that moment when it happens, it may never look exactly like that again. We are living in an extremely changeable time in history. It feels as though nothing is as it appears; what we think we see turns out frequently to ...

"And these are but the outer fringe of His works; how faint the whisper we hear of Him! Who then can understand the thunder of His power?" Job 26:14 (NIV) I squeal over wild skies and catch my breath at mountain splendor and fairly explode with the exhilaration of the wind roaring like a freight train through the pines. I can't pass by an Iris in bloom without stopping to marvel at the imagination of the God who not only thought up its form and colors out of nothing, but made it exquisitely beautiful for everyone . . . or no one . . . to see—He made it just because He can and because it displays something of the beauty that He IS. C. S. Lewis once wrote to his friend of the blessing of seeing, feeling or experiencing something pleasurable, "It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To expe...