In my late teens I was gifted a 35mm camera and that thing took the best photos. As time wore on and technology evolved and children didn’t stay still long enough for me to get everything set to take those awesome photos, life moments were captured by an automatic point and shoot camera. Last year I treated myself to a dslr camera.

I like my new camera a lot. I have some arguments with it, as sometimes it decides to focus on something different than I want it to focus on when I have it set in automatic and it is too twitchy to manually focus (The lovely thing about arguing with an inanimate object, is it doesn’t argue back. I can yell, curse, swear and threaten harm and it does not yell back nor get offended). Otherwise it is a fabulous thing, and I have been pretty pleased with the results.

I took my camera for a walk when we were camping (it is either camera or dogs, it doesn’t go well with both).  Although I was capturing moments of the walk, the sunshine, the landscape, I couldn’t capture the other things that were essential to the essence of the experience. The warmth of the sunshine, the humidity, the drone of the insects, the songs of the blue jay, crow, chickadee, the sound of an indignant red squirrel, the combination smell of warm pine, cedar, and hemlock, the movement of the air across my skin, the textures of the rocks, trees, leaves, pinecones… the sounds of other campers on the trail so that I could speed ahead to avoid any impingement on my moments of solitude.  The visual is captured, the experience is not.