We had a slight pause with photography in the recent days, for several reasons. The most important one is that the amount of karmic mass for spending that we had to deal with has been consistently high, and then periodically it increases exponentially and ruins my day completely, because I need to focus only on that and can’t even pretend I’m doing something else. The second reason is that the weather has been very windy, and since the main subject matter now would be lavender blossom with insects on it, you can imagine how long thin stalks of lavender behave in the wind.

The stalks can move multiple centimeters per second in the wind. Dept of field is 2-3 centimeters max. So, we kind of have an excuse to not go out and take pictures.

Romana got more into photography lately and so I explained to her last night how I don’t just go out with a camera, see a butterfly on a flower and take a picture. Most of the picture is pre-planned before I leave home. I think about what I’d like to shoot, and then I visualise what I would like the picture to look like. The light needs to be like this, the scene needs to be lit like this, the composition needs to look like this, and then I come to the equipment – what lens do I need for such a picture, at what aperture. Then I wait for the time of day when the light will look right, and go to a place where the light will strike from the right direction, and I expect some subject matter to exist. So, before I even took out the camera, most of the picture elements have already been set up. Then I find the “background subject matter”, basically the kind of flowers and leaves that will look good in that light, and then I try to find cooperative insects to compose them into that as the motive that will carry the composition. So it’s not that I just happen to get lucky. Part of it is luck – if I’m hunting for butterflies, there’s no guarantee that I’ll find any, and especially that I’ll find cooperative ones that came to the flower bush to eat, and not just fly away across the path. I need it to stand there and eat, on the right flowers, in the right light, and I need to have the right lens on the right camera. So, basically, I need to have everything else pre-selected and hope I get lucky with the butterfly. Sometimes I come back empty handed, and you don’t hear about that. Sometimes I get lucky and the butterfly that’s just right lands on the flowers that are just right, and it looks easy.

What does it mean, that I don’t just spontaneously take those pictures because I happen to live on Hvar and I happen to have great equipment that does everything? 🙂 Oh shock, oh betrayal. 🙂

Of course it’s all planned and technical. It’s not that meditation turns into pictures by pointing the expensive camera in the general direction of the island.