JULY 14, 2021 – I like to photograph nature. Or rather, I like to frame scenes and objects within nature’s infinite collection of light, lines, color, and compositions. I remember seeing my mother, a painter, often forming a frame in the air with her thumbs and index fingers to “capture” a potential painting. I find myself doing the same, albeit without the aid of a “finger frame.”
Mother loved to paint nature. I have neither her skill nor patience, but I did acquire her enjoyment. When she “framed” a scene, she liked to describe why she framed it one way, as opposed to another. I can tell you only what “I like,” and that above all, I like to experiment.
Unlike real photographers, I have zero technological prowess. My experiments don’t involve fancy adjustments of all my iPhone features that can be adjusted. Rather, I adjust myself—my angle of attack, my perspective, and timing vis-à-vis the state of recline of solar lighting. Sometimes I even “adjust” nature itself. I’ll move a leaf from a log to improve my photograph of the log . . . or of the leaf. Before photographing a group of ferns, I’ll pull out a wilted frond, much as a parent tells a child to ditch the dirty baseball cap before the family photo is quickly snapped.
Admittedly, whenever I “mess with” nature in this regard, I feel as though I’m cheating, but then again, nature itself has no special artistic sensibility. Apart from evolutionary biology—big stripes, bright colors, fancy feathers—nature’s objects aren’t intentionally “artistic” or “beautiful.” “Art” and “beauty” are strictly human constructs. Thus, I should feel morally clear when moving or removing a leaf to satisfy my human perspective.
Or so I thought.
The other day while walking through my tree garden, I came upon an interesting specimen of shelf fungus. What caught my eye were the colored stripes around the outer portion of this fungus. “A thing of beauty,” I said to self. I pulled out my iPhone and knelt on the mossy earth next to the patch on which the fungus had attached itself.
As I prepared to take a close-up, I noticed twigs and a fading star flower plant “interfering” with the intended photo. These imperfections were like an untied shoe and smudge on the face of the six-year-old ensnared for a family photo. With little thought I reached out to eliminate these undesired elements.
But nature unwittingly stayed my hand. On closer inspection I saw that the twigs and plant hadn’t fallen randomly on the fungus. The fungus had grown around the twigs and around the stem of the plant! I marveled at these subtle quirks, unknown and quite unknowable to the world beyond my own haphazardness.
Here, then, was my shot, my chance to photograph yet another example of Mother Earth’s “exceptionalism”—not as I in my human arrogance should deign her to appear, but as she in her subtlety happened to be.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
