Photography's Two Lives: Entertainer, Reminder

We left home Jan. 3. A long time ago.

We've stayed two weeks here, a week there, four days some place else.
We've seen amazing things and met amazing people.

On Wednesday, it'll be April 1.

We've been gone a long time. And have gone a long way.

A friend of mine asked me recently to bring home plenty of pictures. I
will. I've taken many. As I go through my photo albums, I realize how
each picture fails to show what we've seen or the people we've met.
They show bits and pieces of our life on the road, but not our life.

I'm getting sentimental here. How can you photograph vastness?
Quirkiness? Sensitivity? How can a picture of the Pacific Ocean show
wildness?

In the picture above from Fort Bragg, CA, my motor home is the low, white square thing off
to the right, nudging up against the taller string of buildings.
Above the cliff. The picture shows the brilliant blue water crashing
below and the highway behind and the escarpment in front. It doesn't
show the beach to the left with tree-sized driftwood or the grassy
knoll to the right with a new Victorian-style house and community
park. It doesn't show the hiking trail snaking along a precipice
defining the edge of the Earth. I'm standing on that edge to take this
picture.

How can I show you how beautiful, peaceful, serene, windy, nippy, it
is here? Can you hear the foghorn or the sea bell? Or the waves?

Pictures are powerful. Look at the one on my husband's Web site and
you will see what I mean. To the viewer, though, my photographs
provide a mere snapshot of my world. For me, they do much more. They
remind me of my world. They tap at the door to my mind's eye, which
then fills in the circumference.

And I can see, again, what was in my world.