Photography, Meditation, and Travels With Kate

[Dan Goodwin]

Last weekend I went out to the woods with my camera. I usually go out walking most weekends and haven’t been for a few weeks. I soon realised how much I missed it.

Walking in itself is a wonderful, therapeutic experience for me, as is being in nature. I’m a country boy at heart, I grew up climbing trees and playing in fields and tumbling over hay bales, both at home and on the farms where my granddad and uncle (his son) worked. So my natural place is amongst grass and earth and twigs and leaves.

But this is just a prelude to what I really want to write about: photography.

Photography is relatively new to me. I’ve always been in awe of a great photograph, and wondered how it was done. Being all a bit of a mystery to me, combined with the expense and apparent complications of the equipment, and my impatience of having to wait for films to be processed, I have never owned a traditional camera.

Then, maybe 3 years ago, I had my first mobile phone with a relatively good quality digital camera built in. I starting taking a few shots, just things that interested me, friends, nights out, special events and so on.

The next phone camera I got was the first one I really used for “proper” photography, as opposed to just snapshots of people and events. This was my Sony Ericcson K800, or, “Kate” for short. Thus began my series of occasional photo shoots – “Travels With Kate” – in places in nature I found to be calming, healing, spiritual, just plain beautiful.

So, back to last weekend and my latest trip with Kate (technically, Kate the third!).

I want to talk about what it feels to take photos, how it comes to me, what happens inside, because it’s not really like any other creative process.

When you take photos, it’s as if you’re looking beyond the everyday, the obvious surface, with deeper eyes. You’re looking for the most beautiful shots that already exist. In fact it’s not your eyes that are looking, it’s something more instinctive, more soulful that guides you.

It’s not a creative art form like writing or painting where you’re starting with the nothingness of a blank page or canvas and adding word by word, or brushstroke by brushstroke your ideas, your thoughts, your dreams, your experiences, your poetry, your painting.

With photography you’re more like a hunter, an explorer, a seeker of the lingering shimmering wonder that is already there, always has been there, and always will be there. This is true whatever the subject, but possibly more so in the rambling underskirt of nature’s intricate woodlands.

When I think of going to the woods and taking photos, in my mind I imagine the trees being decorated with polaroids. Thousands of them already there. All those gorgeous shots sitting, waiting, all proud in their little white square frames. Can you picture that?

Except the polaroids aren’t really there, not in an obvious visible way. We don’t march through the trees literally plucking these already taken polaroids from the undergrowth, from the bark, from the branches. We have to find them ourselves.

And this is where photography becomes for me, not an art, but a meditation.

What is meditation but having complete presence in the moment? Being fully there, fully engaged, fully you.

With camera, at the moment of capture, I see only the shot framed on that tiny digital screen. Everything outside dissolves and becomes momentarily meaningless.

I forget the annoying rub of that blister on my right heel caused by new shoes. I forget the slight dull pain behind my eyes as a result of an impending cold. I forget the prickly hotness at the back of my neck beneath my scarf that comes when a brisk walk leads to overheating.

I forget the slight grumbling in my tummy because I really need to eat. I forget the sadness that lingers in my heart over relationships gone. I forget the regret of yesterday and the anxiety of tomorrow.

I am simply, there. Right there in the moment. Nothing else matters.

I’m nowhere else but in that couple of square inches of screen. Just photographer me, seeking the most beautiful shot possible, right here and right now.

The click of the shutter ends the moment, and I look in the screen at what I’ve captured. I take another if needed, or smile at what I’ve taken, and move on.

And so the expedition unfolds, and so every capture of every photo unfolds, its own fleeting yet pure meditation, just me and Kate and the moment.

I can almost hear those invisible polaroids tucked in the trees, whispering “ooh me, me, take me next!” and some of them I find, but most I don’t. The meditative spell wears off after anything between ten and a hundred and ten photos and I head home once more.

I enjoy the pictures afterwards, and I like to share them and have people say they enjoy them too. But the real reason I take photos is all in the escape of those moments of capture.

Although it’s something I’ve long known, I only fully became aware last weekend of the simple truth that for me photography equals mediation. And for someone with such a restless mind as mine, that’s something very good for me indeed...

[Dan Goodwin]

Hah ha thanks for the prod DJ! Yes coming to a gallery near you. : )

[DJ]

A lovely, well-written commentary for your next photography collection...to be published in 2010-2011, of course...
And a wonderful sharing of your creative process for us CCSers to be inspired by....
Thank you, Dan...