Last night, I accompanied a friend and her camera to Buckingham Fountain -- not to be confused with Buckingham Palace, which is where I will be spending some time next weekend as a virtual guest at the royal wedding (pardon me, I mean The Royal Wedding). It was a beautiful evening as long as you were dressed, as we were, for winter; beggars can't be choosers, and we Chicagoans have become so accustomed to snow and freezing rain that a little icy wind on an April evening seems downright pleasant.
My friend has tried her hand at blogging, and finds the task of doing it on a daily basis daunting. "These things just roll off your laptop," she despaired when I forwarded her an advance copy of one of my quickies. "Like shit off a shovel," I responded, which I think was far more clever than anything I've written in recent weeks. I thought I was being insightful when I explained to her that writing is like taking pictures; you observe something, and somehow the part of you in charge of your particular craft conspires with the particular tool of your craft -- be it a computer keyboard or a digital camera -- to mold that observation into your version of what it should look like.
She protested. She insisted that photography is different. You're just stuck with what's presented to you, for better or for worse. I was unconvinced. We stood for quite a while watching the fountain, which, for an untrained observer like me was better than watching paint dry only because of the light show that continually altered the color of the undulating waters. She snapped away, constantly adjusting the shutter speed to change the lighting and capture the perfect pattern of light against the background of the dusky Chicago skyline. I watched the water; without color, the fountain looked like a stage for dancing ghosts, their translucent arms flapping eerily in the wind. In a sense, the colors ruined the ghostly performance, transforming the dancing apparitions into plain old colored water. At least that's what I saw.
Eventually, I began to peek at the screen on the back of my friend's camera. There were no dancing ghosts; there was no plain old colored water. Frankly, there wasn't even a fountain. There were dramatic bursts of color exploding like flames against a backdrop of weekend-empty buildings that seemed to overflow with activity. No lights, no people, yet the skyscrapers pierced the cloudy night sky with an energy that was contagious. In the moments captured by the lens of a camera, bright red and green and purple fireballs lapped away at the city while the buildings miraculously refused to burn. I looked away from the camera and back at the scene in front of me. Dancing ghosts and colored water. Dark buildings. Darkening sky. Nothing to write home about.
I'll stick with blogging; it's a pain in the ass to carry around a tripod and a big ass camera and deal with weather and all those other variables. I prefer to take my snapshots with words, transforming the dancing ghosts I see into whatever I want them to be.
Very perceptive.
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