Poetry Friday: A Photography Poem

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!
Little bit of poetic reflection today on another art form I enjoy, photography. I have had conversations a couple of times now with photography romantics (amongst whom I hope I can count myself a member) about how sad it is that today photography is more about digital manipulation than it is actually capturing the moment. While I see the point and don't myself relish the idea of living in a world of altered reality, I myself do play digitally with photos (primarily through Picasa, a great free-Photoshop alternative) and I see two great variations on the theme of manipulation of which I am a big fan...even though I am a romantic who loves reality.

1: The fact that photography has become a manipulatable art doesn't mean it is void...its just able to be a medium that is a little more like painting and sculpting now! I think that's inspiring and fun. We are able to create scenes of great photographic beauty even if we only imagined them.

2: Sometimes, let's face it...reality doesn't quite get captured with your camera. How many times have you excitedly downloaded your photos and then begun clicking through in disappointment, discovering that you didn't catch the thing or feeling you experienced after all?  So sad! But, so redeemable sometimes...thanks to photo manipulation tools. Hooray!

So, I wrote a poem about it.

Saturation

I can slide the bar sideways in Photoshop
And drain off all weak, extraneous white 
My chosen photo throwing back its shoulders 
Standing taller every second, clearing its
Throat and flashing a bolder grin at me
I like some scenes brightly re-incarnated
Better representations of my memory than the
Photograph that ended up inside our camera
Some accidental, watered-down take-away.
Sometimes our Canon doesn't think it important
To catch the hot fuscia vitality of diced rhubarb
Or, mistakenly remembers the fluttering curtains
My sister pieced from jewel-toned calico as some
Faded, older pastel version of themselves,
All frail: sun-used before their time.

Hope you have a beautiful day! The week is over and the sun is shining and the world feels full of promise. We're off to enjoy the warmth and sunshine here in our yard, here's to a wonderful weekend!

If you want to get a taste of other bloggers offerings for Poetry Friday, go check out our host blog for today a wrung sponge.

Titanic to Promising

I was having a bad morning. The kind of bad morning you're bound to have after Monday comes barreling down the road and hits you head-on, after a fabulously happy weekend. I headed in to paint with my friends with a bad attitude. I felt a little like somebody gave me a brain-ectomy and replaced all my wits with over-cooked spaghetti, given me a teaspoon to bail out The Titanic with and then waved blithely from the distance as they set a fuse to crackle slowly towards the ship. So overwhelmed and so hopeless and so alone. I am wandering through new parenting issues that feel super over-the-top and I periodically feel so alone in my marriage and am even feeling at-sea in my housekeeping routine (which, darn it, I was so on top of a week or so ago). Blast Blast Blast.

Image via Wikipedia

So, anyhow...there I was heading in to church...wondering if I should even be there...thinking that I might not even stay and in walks my sweet landscaping friend. So sweet, this friend. And with her gentle way, she flourished an onion-skin paper my direction and suddenly, there on my empty watercolor sheet (uninspired and unproductive in the painting department today) there was the most beautiful garden plan.

A plan. A solution. A stunning work of art, featuring my yard. And just like that, my day turned from ridiculously over-the-top sucky to absolutely survivable...yea, foreshadowing promise.

I feel like I felt when I had my portrait drawn by an artist friend as a surprise.

I feel like my life and my self and the world I am trying to live in and create are beautiful or at least look beautiful to some people or could be beautiful. So much of the time the problems we wade through every single day and the mind-numbing road blocks that zing stunningly up in the way start to feel like they mean something...I forget they mean nothing more than the fact that I'm alive.