I See Her Picture

Today I picked up some photos from the lab, three rolls of medium format color film that I had taken in the past month.  I have one roll of black and white still in process.  I can hardly wait to get them back, too.  These are pottery shards in the archaeological dig of my life.  Some of them are damaged, blurry and maybe don't tell much of anything.  But others, well, others are these glimpses of startling clarity through the mist of time.  Sometimes I hold a particularly good picture in my hands and think I am cradling a new Rosetta stone.  A stone that will allow me to translate the languages I see rather than speak.

What made these particular images significant was the relatively high number of truly good results I achieved.  By that I don't mean pure technical proficiency.  It is more an aggregate of all the things that make good photographs: light, shadow, mood, setting, subject.  In this set of rolls, I had all of those.

Particularly my family.  I took some of the best pictures I have ever taken of my parents and my daughter.  I even ended up with a pretty nifty double exposure of my nephew and his lovely fiance.  Pure accident, cool result.  I don't credit this to any brilliance in talent.  Rather, I think it was a letting go and being in the moment that allowed me to simply take the pictures rather than overthinking them.  And it worked.

The ones of my daughter in particular absolutely floored me.  Wee Lass and I went to the photo lab together to pick them up, and as usual she was excited to see them right away.  The lab is in a building that has a nice lobby with some seats, and she always likes to go sit there and leaf through the pictures.

We had a grand time of it.  She was smiling and commenting.  I was amazed and grateful.  Here's me, this oafish lad who fancies it to take pictures of stuff, and hopes his success rate is like that of a .333 hitter in baseball: you can be unsuccessful two-thirds of the time, and still be considered pretty good.

Looking at the pictures, those blue eyes and that megawatt smile...I got my grand slam.  Somehow I managed to get a snapshot of the heart of the sun.