Sharpening your edge

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Sharpening your edge

In photography, as in life, it's easy to settle.  That 'ole gravitational pull tends toward the static.  Stay safe, within your comfort zone.

In any given season, if I reflect for a bit, I can usually identify my photographic growth edge.  An area where I'm pressing out - or being pressed out by life experience, or the advance of technology - into space where my footing is less sure. 

... I can either cooperate - lean into it, take proactive steps to sharpen my growth edge - or resist.  Dig in.  Shrug it off.  Stay with what I already know.

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Holy mountain transcendence

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... We met them, serendipitously, on the mountain top. They marveled that this golden-haired foreigner could speak their language, perplexed when she explained that I, on the other hand, “couldn’t speak.” We shared simple food and they joked and chattered, absorbed in conversation, oblivious to my astonishment at being welcomed into this hallowed space.

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Seeing what's really there (traveler or tourist?)

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Seeing what's really there (traveler or tourist?)

... Ouch!  I saw it, in a flash.  I had come to Andalucia with a mental map, a tourist’s checklist of what was supposed to be there. 

I was on the hunt for the Granada I wanted to find, the “typical” alleys and doors and arches I had come to see.  Instead, these garish flourishes hemmed me in on all sides.  The further I got from the city’s main commercial artery, looking for the "real" Granada, the more I saw of these fascinating, wildly creative odes to post-modernity — expressions of the living soul of 21st century Granada.

Sheepishly, I relented of my toxic insistence on what I had come for, and embraced, instead, what was actually there ....

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