I have a mantra “find beauty everywhere” and I had a dream that gave me guidance for artistic technique. Most days, life hands you something obvious and beautiful – field of sunflowers, tulips, a sunset, rain on the window…butterflies. There are, of course, times where life hands you nothing but chaos, broken things, things smelly enough to make your nose wrinkle.
For my latest photography self-challenge, I visited an old junkyard. Could I bring this mantra into the most rusty and broken down place?
The first challenge was to get beyond sensory overload. There’s so much ‘stuff’ piling up it’s difficult not to get dizzy with shiny object mentality (or rusty object, more likely.) This past winter I had plenty of recuperation time to study Miksang photography lessons, mindfulness techniques, etc. I’d bring my arsenal of experience to ‘find beauty in a junkyard’.
These surroundings required me to look a little deeper, become a bit quieter, and observant to find that special and unique discovery. Sometimes it was the angle of the landscape, sometimes as simple as a macro of rust, other times just focusing on the colors.
