Monday, February 9, 2015

Seeing 2015 (#1: Anicca)

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(R.I.P. Lloyd M.; gone far, far too young six years ago yesterday, a friend to many)

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(Note: this is an unusually long entry; the photograph, as usual, appears at the bottom of this essay; as always be sure to click on the image to see the full-resolution size . . . it is particularly important for this image.)


For your consideration:

My apologies, dear readers, for the extremely long silent period in this milieu. Due to circumstances not to be elaborated on here, at least not at this point, a hibernation was needed.

It's very, very good to be back.  Thus, the first entry of 2015 . . .

A vector in time . . . evoking a vector of time . . . 

From cradle to grave each of us creates and live our unique narratives.

A few are born into luxury and wealth — a life of "privilege" — wherein most material needs are met with great ease, and access to many resources enabling the semblance of comfort and even nobility is virtually a given aspect of their human experience. In this peculiar universe social status is often paramount, typically coupled with a de facto assessment of personal  value/worth derived from financial standing.

However, the the majority of this tiny orb's Homo sentient beings emerge onto a vastly different stage, a drama featuring considerable daily struggle for basic comforts: adequate shelter, sufficient nutrition, reliable access to potable water, distance from the threat of mortal injury due to the insanity of proximate warring factions . .. the list can be broadly extended. Attending are the oppressive weights of mental and spiritual duress arising from these unceasingly acute challenges.

There is too the middle set, those of us who are neither on the cusp of daily life-and-death scenarios nor inhabiting the artificial cocoon of High Society atmospherics. Here the preponderance of populace energies are focused on the altar of ever-more transient status memes: breathless Twitter trends; Facebook frolics; celebrity fashions; obtaining the next iSomething  — and of course prurient scandals and failures among the rich and powerful.

I posit that those souls in the lower tiers of our species' socioeconomic classes are ironically closest to the authentic experience of true consciousness: day to day the poorest among us are focused on the task at hand, that being simple survival.  Moment to moment much is at stake. Daydreaming of climbing the social ladder is not just beyond comprehension, but also an ill-afforded distraction from the reality of Now.

Meanwhile the rest of us — and I absolutely include me in this herd — live as if in a subtly surreal dream, akin to being actors in a movie, all the while utterly unaware of this self-created reality-show script. As with every person to have trudged the earth we all are driven by the projections we conjure up in our mind. And are not most of us preoccupied with a dyadic conflict, that of being focused on either the past or future?  Only exceedingly rarely are most of us truly, fully engaged in This Moment — a state of Mindfulness.

We're virtually perpetually disconnected from the current state of things.

Compounding this rubric is this: our recollection of the past is guaranteed to be flawed; some details morph (often as per our egos' criteria) while others evaporate; yet other facets of our mental annals are unconscious inventions altogether. As to our views of the future . . . well, honestly now: how much of your life's plan has unfolded as expected?  It is oddly difficult to admit, despite the sheer definition of the matter, that the future is entirely opaque and unknowable in any detail.  With every instant a new moment of reality has arisen, and with it every particle in the universe having vibrated and shifted from that of the instant just passed.

All things change. Superficially this may be a bromide, a cliché dismissed (dear reader) with perhaps more than a hint of disdain. Yet the core of the matter is this: the only reality is the reality of NOW. The entirety of our longevity consists of three states: inhabiting our (flawed) past, projecting a fantastical future, and — if we can discipline our mind enough — being fully Present, and thus fully awake.

Thus, we come to the motivation for this entry's photographic offering: a composition at once stark and spare, paradoxically static while conveying a vector of movement and intensity.

Unlike many (if not most) of my photographic explorations, this image was taken specifically with a preconceived idea: the concept of Mindfulness; I sought out a subject which would afford me the elements of depth, abstraction, and a pointed, singular focal point . . . in particular I wanted to capture a scene wherein a tiny percentage of the image unexpectedly demands the viewer's attention, and thus dominates the tableau, much as the reality of Mindfulness inhabits none but the current instant rending all else (past and future) blurred in comparison.

To execute this shot I chose a macro lens: it allows exceptionally sharp focusing on quite minuscule objects, and the nature of optics in such compositions ensures that the depth of field — what will be sharp versus blurred — will be extremely shallow. Indeed, I set the aperture to its widest (f/2.8) to minimize how much of this vector would be clear . . . ergo, all that comes before and after this focal point is murky . . . a mere single segment can be discerned . . .

Selecting f/2.8 also allowed me the vital asset of a fast shutter speed (1/500th of a second); as I was photographing "hand-held", without any stabilization, an extremely short exposure was essential to ensure any chance of clarity, particularly in light of the very shallow depth of focus on the subject.

The atmospherics were just as I wanted, yet the room was consequently dim enough that a high ISO would be needed to compensate for the 1/500th shutter speed . . . this lead me to use ISO 5000 (!). Not only metaphorically, I held my breath to see how "grainy" the end product would be.  (Given the setting, I'm well-pleased with the outcome.)

Finally, to ensure an absolutely minimalist scene I shot a black surface in a space relatively softly illuminated (light filtering through windows from heavily overcast skies); this ensured the brassy metal would nicely shine against, essentially, a void.

And what exactly do we have here?  A segment of a piano top's hinge. The reader's close inspection of (the full-sized!) image will find a barely perceptible swath of dust to the right of the focal point, lending a subtle sense of actual surface depth, rather than pure void.

(Un)hinge(d): The Essence of Annicas, #2366-7D-II

© 2014 James W. Murray, all rights reserved.

(click image for larger version)

Details: February 6, 2015, Canon 7D Mk II; f/2.8 @ 1/500 sec; ±0 EV; ISO 5000;
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM