Focus

    ...although I guess I could have been cute and called it "Focus on the Family." Yesterday I took brother Malcolm hiking at Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve. There was one especially lovely scenic vista that I hadn't noticed before. I tried to take a picture of both him and it, but just couldn't. He was gracious about letting me take yet another of my people-free nature shots. Later, I did succeed at taking a picture of him surrounded by nature and pinpointed the problem: modern cameras look for a focus and hone in. The rest of the picture becomes background. If the focus is lit differently than the rest, well, too bad for the rest. The picture of Malcolm turned out pretty neat, but really he's too dark and the world around him is all washed out.
    The point is, though, that I always thought that my predilection for pictures without people reflected some degree of sociopathy, and it worried me a little. But what it really reflects is that I just don't know what the hell I'm doing when I get a camera in my hand. I can shoot landscapes because they're easy, but putting a person in a landscape is hard so I long ago gave up. I'm perfectly happy to recognize that I can stand to work on technique and theory. I'm even happier to realize that I'm not really a sociopath. Or at least not in this instance.