Snapshots of a Modest Life

Zoomed Out and Blurry

When we were in Virginia a few years ago, I took my dad's Canon A-1 with me. It's beautiful where I grew up, and I wanted to capture it. The front yard. The view of the house from the front gate. I especially wanted pictures of Draper's Valley Presbyterian Church. We didn't go there when I was a little, but every once in a while we'd find ourselves going up through a gap in the hills and into Draper's Valley. You turn a corner and hit the crest of a hill and spread out before you is a green valley, with a church steeple nestled among trees at the bottom of the hill. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. So I took the camera with me to try and capture it on film. I stood out next to the family van snapping picture after picture. When we finally got them developed, I was disappointed. They were zoomed out too far and a little fuzzy. I ignored one of the main rules from Photography class my freshman or sophomore year of high school: always have a focal point. Don't just take some random picture, there needs to be something to look at. Apparently green rolling hills weren't enough.

I don't know what made me think of that picture, but whatever the case, I couldn't help but draw an analogy between that photograph and my life (here's where it becomes apparent why I'm an English major). The picture is my life. You can tell that the subject has the potential to be beautiful. There's some pretty cool stuff in it. There's that church, and some farm houses in the distance. There's cows and sheep and rocks and a cemetery. It would all make for a really nice picture if I got close enough to really look at it, to focus on it. I tend to bounce around, I'm never focused on one thing long enough to make it something in which I excel. I play piano and guitar, but only just well enough to know that I'm not really that good. I'm mediocre at sports (better than the girliest of girls, but so hopelessly out of shape that I could never be really good). I write fairly well, but the odds of making it as a writer are lower than the odds of getting a speaking part in a feature film. There are all these things that are there in front of me, but I can't focus on any of them and make them a subject for this picture. Instead it's way too zoomed out and a little bit blurry.