American Buddhist Perspectives
“In a way, nobody sees a flower. It is so small, we haven’t the time. To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
But for the most part I am more of a photo-snob, cringing when I see people with gorgeous cameras who simply leave them in “Auto” mode because they’ve never bothered to learn the settings. It is in learning those settings – on a DSLR such as the wonderful Nikon D90 or bottom-end D3000 or on nicer point-and-shoots such as the “prosumer” Canon SX20 IS – that builds a bond between wo/man and machine. Knowing your camera, like a samurai warrior knows his sword, makes it an extension of your body.
About 10 days ago I had the great fortune of testing a new, and incredibly cheap, macro lens on my DSLR. Take a new lens, add flowers for my then-sick girlfriend, and perfect sunlight through the kitchen window and voila, time to take pictures.
For me, photography does not stand between me and a beautiful thing or person or event. The fact that I have a camera, this tool that captures moments of light and life, brings out a new dimension of sight. One of those very professors used to like to say that “everything becomes a nail when you’re carrying around a hammer.” He used this saying to suggest that Marxists might have it wrong to say that everything is Capitalist oppression, or Freudians might be off to say everything goes back to your relationship with your mother. We humans are constantly guilty of this: projection. But with my camera, what am I projecting? Moments of beauty. Moments that tell stories. Moments that illuminate the world we live in.
Could I enjoy it all just as much without the camera? Absolutely. Just tonight, sitting a few feet from Geshe Thupten Phelgye as he discussed Green Tara practice and his great effort to bring vegetarianism to Gelukpa monasteries in India, I did have a moment when I wished I had a camera. The Dharma house, Osel Shen Phen Ling, was packed way beyond capacity and I was sure that images of the Geshe and all of these people who came out to see him would be very precious – especially to those who were there and had invested so much time and effort into bringing him here. (A full schedule of his teachings this week in/around Missoula is at the bottom) But, lacking a camera, I simply sat and enjoyed the teachings.
Can a camera get in the way? Yes, of course. But it’s most intrusive when one doesn’t know how to use it, or if it is of lower quality and requires noisy reconfigurations for each new setting. Admittedly again I’m not the swiftest at setting and reseting my camera. And I haven’t mastered each setting and subsetting. But in the situations that I do have figured out, the camera is never in the way. It is a graceful extension of my eye and hand.
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