Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

I’ve been wanting to go back to my beginner photography roots…back to the tools that first taught me how to see. Not the Leica fixed macro. Not the Sony or Tamron glass. Not even the newer body. None of my inherited equipment. Just…my roots.

I used my fully outdated, beautifully obsolete LUMIX GX7—a replacement for my original GF3, long since gone—and its 20mm prime, with the same kind of macro filters that began and cemented my obsession with close-up work nearly a quarter century ago.

A while ago, we cracked this geode open with a hammer. No fancy saws, just risk and dumb luck here.

I suppose one should be more careful with nature, but nature is often far more careless with itself (and with us) than we would dare to be.

It takes that kind of recklessness to create rocks like this: extreme destruction, tons of pressure, and the long, drawn-out silence of time.

The first shot is a 2×3 crop of the original, watermark added. It radiates stillness, but also origin. Not just a photo of a mineral, but the witnessing of an unveiling. Beauty born not of perfection, but of extreme heat and cold, of force and risk, of patience and faith.

The second is a black-and-white VSCO edit: a touch of clarity, a whisper of bloom, a cool tint in the lightly raised shadows, and a layer of grain like cosmic dust.

But what is really there? What is the captured magic?

In the first, I see the quiet unfolding of a secret. Light caught mid-breath, nestled in silence, not trying to perform, but simply to be observed. Crystals shimmering like they’re whispering, not shouting. Softness holding the sharpness in tension. Truth in the raw moment of becoming.

In the second, I wanted to draw attention to the structure beneath the shimmer. The architecture of pressure. The monochrome strips away the sparkle to reveal something more elemental.

Less about beauty, more about bones. A lunar map. The scar tissue of a planet. A meteorite’s grain. A deep-space scan. A memory of rupture, filtered through time. A chorus of diamonds at the end of becoming, born of charcoal and starlight.

What do you see? Not with your eyes alone, but soul.

Soul vision. That’s what I see with most often. Especially now.

xo,

c.