It wasn’t the usual walk in the park. I was fidgety and uncomfortable in my skin, nothing was right. I knew getting out would be better than staying in, but just getting outdoors wasn’t enough. As I walked down the path it became clear to me that proceeding in the usual way wouldn’t work – I needed to change my approach.

It was summer solstice in the northern hemisphere: plants were at the height of their growth, forming deep, complicated layers of vegetation. (Or did the layers look complex because my own emotional state was fraught?) Each plant struggled to adapt to a niche, to attract the appropriate pollinator, to spread its spores or seeds – in short, to reproduce. The plants grew so thick in their dance for light that I could see only a few inches into the wetlands.

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I’d walked this path and seen these trees and ferns so many times – how could I see it all differently? I wanted a new angle on a familiar story.

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I needed to attend to my surroundings differently in order to photograph what I saw differently.

A different attitude, another kind of looking might help dispel the restless, uncomfortable feelings.

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The little bell flowers on the blueberry bushes were slowly morphing into fruit. Willow catkins hung limp and spent, grass tops bloomed with sprays of delicate flowers, horsetails and ferns unfurled an infinite array of needles, leaflets and spores. The endless layers activity seemed impenetrable, unknowable. Maybe I needed to simply reflect that.

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That afternoon, I was walking through a wet place called Mercer Slough. At 47 degrees 37′ N, 122 degrees 13′ W, it’s a stone’s throw from the busy office complexes and commuter highways spawned by Seattle’s growth.  The slough (pronounced “sloo”) is a slow moving channel of water, shallow but wet all year.  A typical complement of northwest wetland plants gathers there – duckweeds and pond lilies lie on the slough’s surface; willows, horsetails, salmon berries, steeplebush, and many others thickly embroider its edges.

They all have stories to tell.

Some of these stories are easy to see, some are easy to miss, some are so familiar we hardly recognize the story any more.

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Looking up, looking down:

other stories.

No reason to ignore them.

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Looking close, another story (but no – I didn’t find this until I got home and enlarged the image on the screen!).  The tiny Barnacle lichen is at home on the bark of a birch tree.

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Ferns and fences repeated their patterns. I took it all in.

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I didn’t have an earth-shattering revelation that day but by looking a little harder, holding the camera differently from time to time and taking pictures of a few things I might have otherwise ignored, I slithered my way to a clearer emotional state.

When I got home I continued changing it up, processing the pictures differently – darker or blurrier, brighter or softer. Messing with the colors, looking for more stories.

Here are some suggestions to facilitate changing it up:

1. Accept what isn’t “pretty.”  Be open to more.  Photograph something you’d normally pass up, like a pile of mulch.
2. Try different camera angles – askew, pointed down at the ground, whatever. Hold the camera over your head and shoot, maybe blindly.
3. With a zoom lens and control over shutter speed, set the shutter speed for a second, or a half second, and zoom the lens in or out while the shutter is open: intentional blur. Or slow the shutter speed and pan the camera while shooting.
4. Try different effects in post processing.  Try sepia, analog looks, black and white. Which image would lend itself to going very flat and highly detailed, or super soft and blurry?  There is more than one way to create a desired effect.  For example, you can soften an image by decreasing the clarity, decreasing the contrast, increasing noise reduction, increasing haze, playing with color relationships, etc.
5. Take things in a different direction than you would normally. Darken a daytime image until it looks like night, crop like crazy, lighten beyond what seems reasonable, switch out the colors.
6. Go back to an image again and again, with curiosity: what else can it say?
7. Walk away. Take a break and come back refreshed.

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