My So-Called Paradise

I bought a new camera last week, a Panasonic Lumix FZ200. Before you google it, or are you already googling it?, let me tell you that the camera was recommended by a photographer in Costa Rica when my point-and-shoot Lumix broke.

This FZ200 is known as a bridge camera, i.e., the bridge between a point-and-shoot and a true DSLR.

It’s supposedly the best of both worlds…great pictures, tremendously long zoom, without the hassle of changing lenses and carrying a heavy camera bag; it also features full HD video.

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I’m impressed with the pictures I’ve taken over the last few days…not that I really know what I’m talking about.

I was able to snap a hawk in motion in the neighbor’s tall juniper tree in very dim, near dark conditions with the long zoom. Not that the image is sharp, I know, but there’s no way my old camera would have even seen this magnificent bird in such scant light.

I also took a moody shot of Malibu Pier from clear across Pacific Coast Highway at twilight.

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However, the imaging capturing I’ve been thinking about lately isn’t only about photography, it’s about capturing an image in words as well.

Nettie and I were in Vermont a few years ago during the Fall Color Season having a picnic lunch of pate’ and cheese with crackers and red wine in a field of birches against the backdrop of the verdant Vermont hillsides. Suddenly, a gust of wind set the birches bristling alive.

Words popped into my head as if I were snapping a photo of the scene: Castanets with the quilted woodlands before them. The image of the world around me was captured in that phrase.

But did it mean anything to anyone else? Were the words specific enough? Would someone else know that when birch leaves are set into motion suddenly by an autumn breeze they sound like soft castanets, and look like them, too, in their autumnal colors of browns and deep reds like burnished wood?

And the woodlands? How like a quilt are they? Oh, that’s easy. Color patterns on the distant hills do look like quilt swatches, don’t they?

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I said the image of the Malibu Pier I took the other evening was moody. Is it moody for you? And if so, what kind of mood is it?

How many words would it take you to describe that mood? A thousand? Is a picture truly worth a thousand words? Will those words ever capture the same meaning of an image for everyone?

Doubtful. Seems to me we all have our own vision that we bring to the world, a vision that overlays the world as it is. Or perhaps there is no world “as it is.” Perhaps there is only our vision of the world, our own way of interpreting it. Isn’t that so?

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I bought a 32 gigabyte card for my new Lumix. It’ll hold thousands and thousands of pictures and hours of video. I’ll let you know if I ever get close to capturing the meaning of life in my lens, or the path to enlightenment such as an image of the great mandala or a tree in blossom.

Then you can tell me I’m full of bunk…and I’ll believe every word you say.