These two shots were taken yards and moments apart, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses Rachel Carson National Wildlife land along the Mousam River. The Bridle Path is one of my local go-to-places for birds, bugs, wildflowers, and landscapes. I have written about it before, and it rarely fails me when I am out for a local photo-prowl. I posted a set of dragon and damselfly shots from pools along the Path last week. (Dragons down by the River).

The two shots also demonstrate the range of vision available in a small compact superzoom Point and Shoot camera today. They were both taken with the same camera using the fixed zoom that came with it. I use the word vision with intent. The camera is only a tool, and I try not to get caught up too much in the technology, but as a tool, the ability of the camera to capture everything from extreme close-ups to super-wide panoramas expands my vision so that I am paying attention to everything: near and far. This is good.

The first shot is a very large bumble bee in a Beach Rose blossom. I saw the bees in the blossoms and knew it would make a good shot, so I followed a bee until it landed in a likely flower and shot it at the equivalent of 1680mm from about 5 feet away. Even on a small monitor (or laptop screen) the bee is at least twice life size.

The shot is all about fine detail: the fur on the bee, the grains of pollen on its legs, even the texture of the petals. It catches our attention because we rarely look at anything that closely.

The second shot is a three frame panorama, each frame at 24mm wide angle equivalent. I have learned to trust the exposure system of the camera to produce three well matched frames, and the Panorama function in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements to stitch them together pretty much flawlessly. My camera has a panorama assist mode to help line up the frames, but I have found that I can do it pretty much by eye, just by rotating my upper body and squeezing off overlapping frames. This pano is about 135 degrees, and 8000 pixels wide. To see it at all well, you might want to click on the image so it opens to fill the full width of your monitor.

This shot is all about the sweep and grandeur of the cloud-scape over the landscape, and the way the light interacts with the larger geometry of the wide view. In life, our zone of attention is narrower than this. We would sweep our heads and our vision just as the camera swept, seeing this in at least 3 segments, even though if we centered our vision and relaxed, we would see the whole sweep just as it is presented in the image. We just don’t do that, or at least very often.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.  Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (after stitching in PSE for the pano).

And for the Sunday thought: it comes down to why I feel good about having my attention expanded to cover everything from bees in the blossoms to the the play of light across the widest expanse of cloud and landscape.

I think the pressure of modern life compresses our vision and our attention. We don’t look very closely at anything and we don’t stop to take in the vista for the same reason. We don’t have time. We don’t have energy. All our attention is focused on the middle ground…the things that are large enough so we have to deal with them, but not so large that we can’t deal with them. It limits us, both in the physical, and since the physical is the living presence and present-time of the eternal spirit, in the spiritual as well. In a very real sense, our spirits are only as big, in the moment, as our attention to the world around us. Modern life makes us small. When we expand our vision we make more room for the spirit, we get bigger. We are created as spiritual beings living a physical life, to be agents of creation in this world. We can not afford to let life compress us.

So, it is good for me to have a camera that encourages my attention to the bees in the blossoms near at hand one moment, and to the way the clouds pile over the wide expanse the next. It is good.