Meditations XVII

 "Meditation 17" is from my latest series of ongoing photographs. Working with pinhole cameras in the outdoors is an exercise that takes me closest to something like meditation. There is a lot of just working, moving through an area, chasing light with my sack of preloaded cameras. I've standardized the cameras to give the same view in an effort to reduce the variables as I work, but surprises keep happening.

One of the reasons I keep doing this. Changing, chasing light rather, is the best way I know how to put this. Light creates forms and light embellishes them. The tree, the rock, the grass, the angle, the dirt, these are all important, but it's how all the elements of the scene work in concert with light that creates the photographs.

This all sounds mystical, and in some ways it is a magical thing when it all comes together. The best images capture more than the view of a place. They hint at and lean into something more, using the visual to try and get at something beyond the visual. Call it spiritual. "Meditations 17" captures such a view in a Colorado forest.

This further spiritual meaning is hard to talk about and I really lack the words to do it. The photograph steps beyond a landscape view and conveys a meditation's essence.