the gift

 

Paddling through the Broken Islands we saw mussels as big as footballs and starfish with uncountable legs and bodies as wide as our kayaks. A second sun shone up from the ocean floor, illuminating underwater forests of giant kelp that swayed and entangled, a slick, glowing green.

After a day of chasing whales and surfing bottleneck currents we’d choose a beach on one island or another, pull our boats onshore. Then we’d tuck into cold beer and sit by a fire until rosy, cleansing woodsmoke permeated every pore. Watched by thousand year-old cedars and hemlocks that dwarfed their tiny outposts, with roots like fingertips wrapped around the edge of the sand.

It was in this sand that the skull of the sea otter shone bleached white, part-sculpture and part-ghost. Proud, unapologetic, not a whiff of self-pity. I felt like I’d been singled out to receive this gift.

He lives in the kitchen, a different spot every day for how much I pick him up to feel his prickly smoothness in my hands. He reminds me of that place I escape to in my head—the sound of my bow slicing through swell, of the heat in my arms taking me deeper into the peace of where there are no people.

Show us something precious to you—something unexpected, discovered and clung to as an artifact of some fabulous epic or episode. Let’s get through the February doldrums by sharing a few tall tales, eh?

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Addendum: I should clarify—as great as they are, tall tales are not limited to beach finds. Show us any inanimate object in your home that tells a story—a first edition of a favourite book someone gave you, your mother's handwritten recipe cards, a vase bought in your adventuring days from a street vendor in some exotic locale. Or maybe just the first macaroni-and-glue artwork given to you by a child. Tell! Show! Anything goes.

belated valentine

The husband, too often, is trumped by sons and daughters. Conversation is reduced to tokens of business such as

Hello. We got another power bill and did you remember to pick up more milk and I forgot to take out the recycling again and that cheese isn’t supposed to be blue and watch out, that’s a poopy sock. Goodnight.

Bleary-eyed we stagger through parenthood, aware of each other only peripherally. In front of the camera he exists as child-carrier, slide-catcher and armpit-tickler, captured in bits and pieces alongside headlining cereal-splattered cheeks and tricycle prowess.

I’m still in a state of shock that, with a baby and a toddler in the house, a marriage with this man takes effort—effort in the way of just remembering to just be with each other and laugh, and talk, and look at each other straight in the eyes, the way we used to.

This photo is who Justin was, before. May I be so bold? RAWR.

And after? There is none yet. Not of this classic magnitude. But there will be. Post-Valentine, I’m determined: a portrait of him as himself, rather than as child-prop.

Want to join me?

Peel your camera away from the kids. Introduce us to yours, and tell us about him (or her)—the before, or the after—just your partner, no one else. Share a picture of what made (and makes) you love: a stance, a grin. Or the way he wraps his hand around the paddle of a canoe, an extension of his arm, as natural as if he were born to this place.

macro

A newborn fern reaches, twists to bask in the single beam of sun that penetrates the rainforest canopy, a spotlight.

Dew on leaf and nectar supped by butterfly. Sweat on the glass brim of a summer martini. With the macro lens on my 1970s-era Pentax I was dwarfed by worlds within worlds, transported hands-first into shimmering giantness, enveloped. Wrapped in more life and light and vividness than I’d ever known existed—that which could only be discerned by getting really. close. up.

Happily engulfed by the otherworld inside a macro lens, the big outside mattered less.

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I don’t have so much diversity to offer these days. Not what's botanical and artistic and profound aside from what lives and dances and giggles inside these four walls, this small house on the edge of a seasalty coast, these two boys, this mama’s life.

So week after week it’s the first kid, then the second. Then the first, then the second. And I’m sorry for that and feel entirely humbled by all of you and the gorgeousness in the pool but 1) there is an ice-storm outside, oppressive and bone-chilling and not so welcoming for baby-laden photo excursions; and 2) in the effort of capturing my boys I find the same vividness, the same meditation as before.

These days, I’m macro-less. But camera pointed at these faces, the wonder returns.

Wishing I could crawl in between those eyelashes, turn around and see from his vantage point how the world looks, as he studies it.

You don’t mind, do you?

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This week, I’d love to see your favourite macro shots. Tide me over until light and weather and childcare and disposable income and a good deal on a lens conspire to set me loose among the dewy ferns again.

Gimme a dose, willya?

Photographic crackle

Seth Godin talks of the soul expansion to be found by “leaning into” problems. To that I’ll add—as taught to me by my three-year-old—world expansion is to be found by leaning into what’s new and unfamiliar.

This is the dynamic I see here, in this near-disregarded frame: the crackling in the air between Evan and a talking parrot as Justin attempts to peel him away for the next adventure on our City Day list.

It’s closer to rule-of-nines than rule-of-thirds, I scoff, the subject almost completely off the canvas. Shoot.

But it speaks to me, because it's… just Evan, perfect Evan.

To me, the unconventional eye has the best luck capturing how humans knock around in the world and bump up against one another. Like looking at a famed painted portrait and seeing a person true-to-form, fine enough, versus looking at an abstract painting and almost hearing the sound of its cadence.

As photographers this crackling surprises us, wills us to notice it. We can’t plan it, force it. This palpable push-pull force allows itself to be evidenced like the fuzzy outlines of some glowing aura in the background of an old tintype. It makes an appearance when it chooses, an unexpected, delightful guest.

StefanieRenee caught the leap of faith that is a second pregnancy, the imminent sharing of flesh and love. Call Me Karate shares a little boy and all his unspoken questions. Straightforward enough, that shot—but it vibrates. Shama-lama Mama shows us the carrying of a child, the walking through life burdened, compared to before—and basks in it. Denim caught my eye tonight with her phenomenal starkness, like a dream. It should be a relatively ordinary shot (person standing in field), but that person is saying something to me. I'm still trying to figure out what it is I'm hearing...

How about you? In the comments, link to shots that speak to you—yours or someone else's—the quirky, the nearly-deleted, the inexplicably extraordinary, the happy accidents. Show us magic, crackling.

ferry terminal

Back in the day I’d roam the streets with my 25-year-old Pentax K-1000, desperate to find something INTERESTING.

I loved those photography courses. Photojournalism, darkroom, abstract. It seems so far away to me now, the prospect of self-betterment just for the fun of it, sitting here typing one-handed, jiggling baby number two.

These assignment shots make me hopelessly nostalgic, sniffing the five-year-old fumes of the fantasy of disposable time. Wandering, subject-hunting, answerable to no one. All snow-capped peaks and Chinatown scenes and whales from my kayak as opposed to today's snotty noses and 'spwinkle'-laden birthday cakes. Sure, I didn't have inspiration like this. Or this. But I sure do miss those creative excursions.

I remember lying on my stomach on a pile of rusty metal garbage in the rain, stalking. Chin to the pavement, facing the gloomy underside of a shipbuilding trailer on the North Vancouver docks, waiting for a pack of feral cats to trust me enough to let me document their scruff and scrappiness.

Not much different with people, come to think of it.

Accosting passerby, trying to explain why I found them interesting, somehow, just as they were.