The Wide View. Happy Sunday!

Parker River NWR, south end looking north north-west.

This is a portrait orientation Sweep Panorama from the Sony HX400V. Is is about 120 degrees of sweep, from just south of west to just east of north. Winter light on the marsh and snow squalls under those clouds as they come in. Patchy sun highlights the foreground while the tree line is still in shadow. And the massive clouds over all. Not a compelling image…but pleasant, and rewarding.

Sweep Panoramas, especially the more natural looking panoramas taken with the camera held vertically during the sweep, provide, still within the frame, something very close to the naked eye view of the world. We are used to looking at photos that range from normal wide angle to tight telephotos…photos that approximate our “focused area of attention”…photos that frame just as much of the world as we generally pay attention to. In a sense, every photographer offers a digest of the world…with the focus…the area of interest…preselected for us as something worth looking at. A portrait Sweep Panorama like this one challenges our photographic senses. We don’t know quite what to make of it. Where are we supposed to look? And that is the whole point. Sometimes there is interest in looking at the whole thing…the sweep of the landscape…the play of light across the land under, as in this case, a dramatic sky. Sometimes the attention needs a wider focus…sometimes there is reward in a wider view.

We tend to go through our spiritual lives in the same way…recording a digest of the high points…paying attention to what has obvious interest and meaning…when all the time the sweep of the spirit through our lives is like the sun playing across the landscape under a dramatic sky. There is reward in pulling back to enjoy the wider view. And challenge. We are such focused creatures. When the view becomes too wide we struggle to make sense of it…but it is, I think, worth the extra effort. It returns us to our point of true perspective, where we are, relatively speaking, pretty small in the grand landscape. This is good. Humbling, but good. God would not have given us eyes to see the wider view if God did not intend us to use them. Yes, we are in our focused attention…but yes we are also in the sweep of life around us. It is good to be reminded. I think. Happy Sunday!

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