2446 - The Spur Of The Moment

Sometimes I get accused of careless driving. “You always look to the sides for possible pictures”, I keep hearing, but rest assured, nothing could be further from the truth 😄

Let me use this image for an example. I was driving a winding road along a river, and suddenly I knew I had to stop and take a picture. There was something that I had seen, that had fascinated me, but even if my life had depended on it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was. In fact I had not the slightest idea.

Thus, when I stopped and went the maybe 100 meters back, I was curious myself what I would find.

Being already outside of the car, I made two pictures along the short way, each time completely confident that what I saw was not what had made me stop in the first place. On the other hand, when I saw what became this picture, I immediately knew that this fallen tree drowning in plants had been the reason why I was there.

The point of the story? Doing something like photography for a long time changes your perception and shifts much of the process into the unconscious. You stop taking photographs, you become a photographer.

The Song of the Day is “The Spur Of The Moment” from the 1955 album “The Jazz Experiments of Charlie Mingus”. Hear it on YouTube.