Tag: perspective

  • Someday…or Night

    Someday…or Night

    entry ten — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.


    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    My mother always told me, in every possible circumstance a child might ever need encouragement, “Do your best, and leave the rest. It’ll all come right some day or night.” 

    It was a line from “Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell.”  

    She was a third grade teacher, a grammar Nazi, and a mother trying her damndest to connect with me and, well, do her best. 

    And, as ornery and difficult a young person as I could often be, she never knew that I believed her…

    …even when I forgot I did.

    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    There was so much distance between us as I struggled through high school with her overbearing “sin obsessed” guidance, and she struggled to save my soul. 

    Even when the days were so long, when they bled into each other, and when the nights felt like punishments I hadn’t earned, as her brain and body were swallowed by Alzheimer’s. 

    Even when the thread broke, or maybe I cut it, when she died…I honored and nursed a clean, holy wound in the shape of freedom for both of us, from past grievances, from debts yet unpaid, from fear, from tension, from aching hearts and confused minds and the evils of that horrific disease.

    Still, that line stayed, like a soft breath. Like a healing balm. Like the part of her that couldn’t leave, because it lived in me.

    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Do your best. Not more than that. Not perfection. Just presence. I tried, truly. 

    Leave the rest… The story. The tragedy. The one who couldn’t stay.

    It will all come right…and maybe it already has.

  • Petalweight (Yield)

    Petalweight (Yield)

    entry nine — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.


    Weevil (Meibomeus musculus), a quiet laborer of the forest and the fields…carrying the weight of being, petal by petal. 
    Vision: Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S.
    Tools: VSCO (KP3), Mextures (personalized texture formula: QBHASZK), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    There is a kind of presence that doesn’t announce itself.

    No sound. No shimmer. No need to be noticed. Just a body doing what it does.

    Clinging to a petal, breathing the moment, belonging to the quiet. Sometimes, that is the work.

    Not saving, not proving. Just being.

    And somehow…it shifts the entire forest, the entire field.

    For some souls, there is a burden in being seen —not the fear of visibility, but the ache of being misread when presence itself was the offering.

    This is the shape of a soul made for stillness.

    This is the purpose of a hidden heart.

  • Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

    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.

    Original capture, using LUMIX GX7 + 20mm prime kit lens + stacked, simple macro filters (10, 4, 2, 1).

    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.

    VSCO edit of original, using B5 Pro (further edits described below).

    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.