At the sum of it all, photography is a matter of perception – yours and mine. I see something which arouses my sensibilities, I photograph it with the intention of capturing the feeling within me – that is my perception, and you see the same photograph with your perception. And of course, our individual perceptions are a function of our environs. But then this post is not a polymath’s thesis of such things.
I was actually thinking of what I’d mentioned in my last blog about failing many times in the past. Yes, I confess that there were occasions after such instances of failure when I would be despondent and dejected, all the while wondering how and why I failed and thought it to be the end of the world. For much time after that would linger the “wrong-side-of-the-bed” syndrome, feeling blue without realizing in the least that the world continued to be a wonderful place to be, resplendent in all its beauty and opportunity. I should have just remembered Richard Bach when he wrote in Illusions: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” All a matter of perception.
I would be entrapped in a maze of doubt, thinking, feeling, believing that my failures, my problems, my sorrows were unique – but nothing could be farther than the truth. We all go through ups and downs. What I never realized at that point of time is that what goes up must come down – so neither the good times nor the bad times last forever. Not any longer. I have now learnt that the path to success is strewn with failure. Before that singular amazing photograph, thousands will be iffy. Churchill said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Just keep the faith. And so along with perception, it is also a matter of attitude.
Quick example. Just the other day, I was driving to someplace in Delhi in peak traffic and those of you familiar with the traffic here would agree that rush-hour (or any hour) is not the right time to be on these roads. When I got back home, all of a sudden to my absolute surprise I realized that nothing had bothered me all that while on the road. I didn’t even notice the traffic. Not once did I cuss the driver in the adjacent lane, no one had affected me. Where I was had had no effect on me. I had great music going in the car and all the while I was thinking of the beautiful places I need to photograph, all the lost corners I have to travel to, all these yet unwritten words. I was effusive and buoyant and nothing else mattered. And in another post, I will write about where I am in life today for a QED to this point. You see it is, and always has been my choice to see things either as half-empty or half-full. My perception. My attitude.
We all are free to make choices of our own volition. Now these are all photographs made a few hundred yards of each other, within half-an-hour or thereabouts which I feel show how we can see the same sunset in many ways. All different perceptions of the same environment.
As I photographed this, I remembered what Ansel Adams, the brilliant landscape photographer said: “Sometimes I arrive just when God is ready to have someone click the shutter.”
And my thoughts as I saw the sun go down: it is our choice to remember that the light of day will always be followed by the darkness of the night, surely as it in turn will be followed by the dawn – a new beginning. It is what we call the circle of life, the light at the end of the tunnel, when winter turns to spring.
It is just what Axl Rose sings:
So never mind the darkness,
We still can find a way,
‘Cause nothin’ lasts forever,
Even cold November rain.
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