don’t write many blog posts, so I have no excuse for this one being a stretch but stay with me here.

I have noticed that when I am at ease (purposefully avoiding the word “happy”) with the world – maybe what Quakers mean when they say “in right relation to” – that I have a sense of expansiveness. A sense of plenty of space around me. And that space allows me to feel generous and forgiving and accepting.

On the other hand, when I am out of sorts – angry, defensive, feeling victimized – then my world gets very small and tight. There’s so little space that my body clenches and my muscles tighten.

And I had the thought that maybe cause and effect can be reversed; that if I can relax a bit and feel the spaciousness of the world around me, that it would trigger within me an emotional response of feeling expansive and relaxed, no matter the circumstances. And I’ve found that it works, at least to a degree, and to the degree that I remember to try it. Enough that I try to carry it with me more, so that I can remember to invoke it when things start to close in.

Then I wondered if this applied in any way to photography. Coincidentally, I began shooting not with my favorite 80-400 lens, but with a 35mm equivalent on a new Fujifilm X100.

My first reaction to using this camera (with its fixed lens) was that things were too distant: that bird I wanted to shoot was but a few white pixels in an overwhelming rectangle of blue and green. The single branch I saw with the warm, caressing light on it was lost within the shadows of not just the trees, but the entire forest. So I adjusted – to a degree – and began to try and shoot other things: trees instead of branches, coastlines instead of outcroppings, environments instead of heads-and-shoulders.

And then I took the camera to Mallorca, and when I came home and began looking at the images I’d taken, I began to see that in some cases, what I had really been shooting was space. The image above is one which really struck me: you can argue that the subject of this image is an alley, or light, or even a mood, but to me it’s the contrast between the constricted space of the narrow passageway and the wide expanse of the utter blackness all around. Because while we can surmise that those shadows are simply hiding more walls, the blankness serves more, to me, as a pasture within which the alley rests: and that pasture is boundless and empty. It allows me to feel benignly toward what could otherwise be interpreted as confining, or even chaotic with the twice-redirected lines, the sagging overpass, the serrated fern edges and the dim beyond.

Compared to the cropped version – what I might have taken with my zoom lens – the 35mm feels more generous, more forgiving in its nature. It allows the viewer in and lets them ponder, whereas the tighter version tells you too much what it is all about. There’s little room to wonder, scant space to breathe.

Different tools, different results. My expectations of what I wanted to shoot with the new camera, and why I could not get that, constricted and frustrated me. And the lesson that is finally penetrating my resistant mind is to shoot not just what I want to shoot, but the overlap between what I like and what the camera does well - which in this case, is something more generous and spacious.