Seek Beauty

We headed out to Deep Cove Park last Saturday, a mere thirty-minute drive. There were last minute plans to kayak and have our once-a-year honey-donut fix from that tiny place there. We didn’t make any reservations for the kayaks–we never had the need to–and it turned out they were fully booked for the entire weekend. Good thing we had donuts before we walked to the rental shop, so we were in good spirits.

Not choosing to let that set us back, we just decided to hike around the area and take photos. I to love walk through the forest and take photos. It’s relaxing and rejuvenating for one’s soul. Now that I’m comfortable with taking photos, hiking and photography go hand-in-hand as one of the best stress-relievers there is. I’m not looking to get a photo to be published, I’m just seeking beauty. And when you get into that thinking, they just reveal themselves to you…

When I started getting into photography and looking at established photographer’s photos, I’ve yearned to get inside their heads and know what they were thinking. I wanted to know how they find the shots they took. I wanted to know what to look for. It was almost as if I was ill-equipped of some special looking glass that these photographers were predisposed with. I was lost. I felt the same fear when I was learning how to play the piano. Being able to play the tune just from listening or thinking of your own music eluded me even after eight years of sacrificing pretty long nails to get a nice firm grip on the white keyboard. I needed to create something of my own, but I just didn’t quite get there. There I was, in the same scenario as a seven-year old tapping the piano keys, wondering if I’ll ever be good at it.

I first held a camera at a young age, a black and silver Pentax wider than my face with a metal lever you need to slide to move to the next frame. I didn’t have film but I imagined taking photos of everything I enjoyed: the swings in the playground that we used to ride so high and brag about who flew higher (dangerous, but we lived to laugh about it) or the wooden seasaws held by big yellow pipes, whose wood grains and cracks I still remember. Photography was a luxury with the era of films and being in Asia with the unfortunate exchange rate of the Philippine Peso, and a little frivolous for a child to waste a roll of film, so I never really caught them on film at age seven. In the coming years, I traveled with my imagination as I watched my dad develop his hobby of photography, going on group trips to take photos in faraway islands. He would get his developed film and have huge prints mounted behind glass with metal frames and hang them on the living room walls, right above my piano. Before I begin my after-school scales on the piano, I would look up and wonder when I will take photos like them!

When I first got a digital camera (a Canon Powershot S40), I trudged on for a while without making any any progress. I still couldn’t see and you can tell from the photos that I clearly had no clue what I was taking a photo of. I almost gave up. Eventually, I learned to let go of being hung up on trying to get the right shots, the right angle, or what I felt I was supposed to do in general. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? I can just easily delete photos. That was a liberating moment for me. I didn’t have to look for anything pretty. Anything can be beautiful if you just let it. If you can, for just one second, believe that it is.

For anything in life, it really is just easy to be so focused on perfection; on the well-established and perceived version of beauty; on something worthy of its own pedestal; because anything outside of that norm is unchartered territory. And that’s how I found my own ’style’ I guess, by allowing myself to take the road less traveled, ‘r the shots less taken! I choose to see beauty wherever it is. Others may disagree and that’s perfectly fine. I’m at peace with what I “see” and “create”, enough so that I am not scared to share them anymore.