Let the Picture Speaks

The moment you got out from the car, the beauty before you overwhelms you completely. The excitement and the expectations that had been building up throughout the journey getting there is just waiting to burst forth. Your mind goes through the numerous images that you have seen before from postcards. Without wasting a second, with camera in hand, you jumped straight into the scene and shooting wildly, taking hundreds of pictures within minutes, burst after burst.

Yet, when you got home and downloaded the pictures into your laptop, only to realise that you have taken hundred of pictures of the same thing or location, some from a slightly different angle but many that looks exactly the same. Then a sense of regret or disappointment sets in and you wanted to hit yourself in the head for being so stupid and wasting so much time capturing the same scene and you wondered if there were more to the place than what you have captured, and you knew deep within, that being there was probably once in a lifetime opportunity.

I have been in this situation far too many times than I can remember, especially earlier on when I first got my camera, not that I am not guilty of it even now. One possible reason could be that I was so fearful that I would miss out that perfect angle that I ended up spending so much time taking shots after shots of the same scene.

But as time goes by, I am learning, yes, learning to remind myself to remember to look at the bigger picture and also to pay attention to all the supporting casts. 

Besides frantically shooting the main cast of a particular location, which I still do (after all, that was the main reason that I was there in the first place), I am learning to spent more time looking at the surroundings, allowing the image captured within the frame of my view finder speaks to me. There are times when I have to close my eyes to break my tunnel vision, so that I could view the entire scene from hopefully a different perspective.

When I was at the National Cathedral at Washington DC, I was busy photographing the cathedral itself but at the same time, I was glad that I actually took the time to walk around the grounds of the cathedral and stumbled upon a small quiet garden and gave me shots that spoke to me even today as I looked back at them, still reminding me of the feeling that I actually felt when I was wandering through the small little path among the bushes, trees and scrubs.

 

Let the picture speaks.