The importance of a point of view.
As a commute, one morning , I was sitting near the window of my train. I saw this woman working on a very old camera, she seemed so professional with that object in her hands. After a while my curiosity beat my shyness, so I started to talk with her.
During our conversation I asked “What is the most important aspect of taking a picture?” I expected to hear some technical answers based on the power of the lenses or on the ISO.
Nothing of these things. She answered in a very reactive way, typical of those people who know the answer due to their own experience.
She said “The point of view of the photographer”.
What? Only that? I believed it was a simplistic way to get rid of that conversation. But she continued her speech, saying something that surprised me.
She said “At the end of the day, you decide which frame you want to capture forever, you decide how to see things, you decide how to shape that reality, how to create that picture”.
She was totally right.
The photographer can decide how to face a reality that can be seen in many different ways from many different people. Where I can see too much dark, you can see an opportunity to test your abilities in shooting the night.
This thing made me wonder.
What if our day-to-day life is nothing but a best point of view choice? Are we the photographers of our reality? Can we decide which colors we want to capture throughout the day?
That woman maybe used a right concept to underline the essence of our lives: they are nothing but a long, limited, succession of frames. Each second is like a second in a movie, it is like the perfect light moment for a photographer to shoot a landscape, it is something that can be seen in many different ways. It lasts just a second.
That frame will remain the same for that moment, but we can change our point of view to take a better picture.
We can light up the brightest colours of our daily life or we can highlight the darkest part of our problems. Because a picture has not to bring happiness necessarily, it can bring also negative emotions.
It is not true that we have to force ourselves to be happy all the time. There are moments in life where a reflective and sad walk along the seaside, in the city center, or in a wood can help us to better focus our current frame and take the most sincere picture.
But if the object of a picture remains the same as some situations in our life, we can still change our point of view. We can decide to take a different picture of that moment. Changing our perspective in relation to a problem can change our whole mindset, it can enlighten some dark corners that scare us.
This is a way to put many different pictures in our life’s photo album.
Maybe not all those pictures are memories of happy moments, but each shoot taught us something.
Better, each object to be shot gives us the chance to move away from our comfort zone and make a step forward, backward, or sideways, depending on the situation.
Most of the times is a matter of opportunity. The opportunity to keep that slippery, unknown, frightening frame in our life’s book.
Remembering that the most relevant aspect is to be aware of the short-lived nature of that frame. It lasts just the time of taking a picture.
And so, what is your point of view?
