Finding Our Place
Looking up and around at the world
There’s a certain novelty to capturing moments abroad. You start asking questions about how to memorialize your time, and then you fire off rapid shots with your cellphone, attempting to bottle up the beauty of the moment into a digital package. This gets sent out in your monthly family newsletters or Christmas-time apologetics and then discarded until a chance encounter with your phone’s photo album dredges up the experience.
If you stumbled through that thought and felt it was directly targeting you, welcome to the club. This is where we often exist, between the already and the not-yet. We need the reminders of history to push us into the future, yet here we stand, treading the waters of the present.
Emma and I decided that we might as well make some of these moments a bit more ridiculous than others. By “ridiculous”, we also mean memorable. From getting scowled at by the attendants in La Sagrada Família to the questioning looks of people in Parc Güell, we made our moments stand out. And, when the time comes to scroll through that photo library on the phone, you can laugh a little and remember what went on a bit better.
There was absolutely nothing remarkable about this little incursion into the Gothic Quarter. We had been walking around, trying to burn off time before our scheduled time slot at the Picasso Museum. Turning left into an alleyway resulted in us having a gander at some of the “for sale” signs attached to the building in front of us and admiring the offset of the walls and windows. Inspiration being what it is, we decided we could have fun with an ultra-wide shot andwithout further ado, the phone went down on the ground,, and several shots were taken.
I’ve talked about looking up and perceiving the world around you from the different vantage points we’re afforded with all the technology at our disposal. When we look at images like these, we often get a better perspective on what is and what was, a context we can use to tell stories, recount memories, and perhaps exist better in our spaces. All in all, these moments remind us of the beautiful moments we all exist in.
Today’s short post offers a distinct challenge: changing your view. Try setting your phone camera to a timer, enabling an ultra-wide shot (0.5x on the iPhone, for what it’s worth), and finding a space to capture more than just yourself. Be it the sky, puffy clouds, buildings, trees or the world around you, the goal is to find your place. And, as you continue to move forward in time, day after day, you’ll be able to come back to these images, these captured moments, and understand how you fit into the overall story of our world. (Let’s be honest, we’ll also laugh at how ridiculous we look.)
May it ever be so.
