When I head out with my cameras slung around my shoulders, with a waterproof and layers in the car, I have a vague plan. I know broadly where I am heading, and will point the car in that direction. But that is it. I will take a random detour, or head up a gravel road towards a distant view, or walk a path that is barely there. Fall in a ditch I hadn’t seen or trip on a fence I wasn’t looking at.
Results can be mixed. Dozens of photos binned because the rain drops are so large that Lightroom would need to recreate the image from scratch. Or walking a path that completely fails to open up on a breathtaking vista before it peters out. Or worse, a breathtaking vista just behind three metre tall cutty grass (a New Zealand special).
But often I get something unexpected. And completely mine.
This Torii Gate in Japan, gateway to a small shrine, halfway up a cliff, inaccessible. So far away as to be functionally invisible. The kind of rain that just soaks you from the inside of your waterproof out. Light as flat as a flat thing that has been sat on. Charitably referred to as “atmospheric” weather. By people nice and dry indoors. But even here there is stillness, mood, shape, beauty. In a deserted car park.
This one I had a loop to drive. Nearly, almost a schedule. I arrived at the viewpoint for a Japanese industrial complex in the middle of the afternoon. Grey. Boring. I snapped a desultory picture almost out of spite, and started to head to the car. My phone pinged. A friend in need of a chat. I sat down. Absorbed in our conversation. Time passed entirely unnoticed. Then the chat ended and I looked up. I gawped. And then laughed. Joy bubbling up. The same place unrecognisable. Backlit by the golden light. The mundane industrial area transformed. A gift for taking the time to be present in a different way.
This one. A path leading away from a perfectly adequate but unspectacular view; a vision in mediocrity. Several people happy snapping. To be fair, I am being harsh. It was a pretty view, but by now I had seen better.
A wander down the path to a heavily vegetated dead end. Alone. A meander back and the spotting of a smaller, more overgrown path I missed on the way down. Then a chain link fence. Overgrown. A tiny gap in the fence. A sharp intake of excited breath and a frantic stuffing of a very expensive, heavy lens through the chain links. Endless curiosity and a literal instruction for a unique image.
I nearly didn’t visit this beach. It’s been used as a Microsoft screensaver, ‘what is there left to discover?’ Watching the stream of people trudging the deep, dry sand of the dunes behind the beach, ‘and I am not going to be alone here, meh’.
Then I shrugged and trudged on anyway. The passage through the dunes opening up into a long, wide beach, sea stacks littered along the shore. The beach so vast that it felt empty. Extraordinary.
One lone King Cormorant, paddling. A tiny presence against these huge rocks and endless beach. I took a long detour to avoid disturbing it, and then did my best stealth shuffle back towards it, a tiny, careful step at a time. Until it got bored of monitoring me and went back to whatever cormorants do, oblivious to the grandeur, forgetting I was there.
I think my life motto should be ‘I do the best with what I have’.
Sometimes what I have is relentless rain, flat light and a deserted car park. Sometimes it is a perfectly adequate view and a path disappearing around the corner. Sometimes it is a schedule abandoned for a friend. Sometimes it is one small bird on an enormous beach.
I think I am restless enough to be patient. To stay a little longer. Walk a little further. Get distracted. Look somewhere else. Not because I am waiting for something in particular.
Just because I am not quite finished looking.
And there is such joy when I find something I didn’t know was there.