Zoom In, See the World

Summer is here and my camera is ready while I walk my dog. I don’t always appreciate the high temperatures and heavy humidity that come to my hometown during the middle of the year, but I still prefer them over the cold and dry starkness of winter.

However, this season’s sauna-like weather does have some benefits: it often brings dramatic, pop-up thunderstorms that make me stop and stare in awe (and sometimes run for shelter before I get drenched). Trees toss their heads in the ensuing gales as dark grey skies swirl above. Rain roars by and pelts everything it can reach. Twigs and leaves get ripped from their branches, dance in the wind, and land on the ground.

Most people think it messy. You wouldn’t think the detritus of a tree would be pretty. Unless you zoom in.

Zoom in. That’s what I’ve been trying to do recently: spot the little details that might otherwise be missed and find beauty in unexpected places. I’m convinced there’s a world of Earthly art out there just waiting for the right person with the right perspective to notice it at the right time.

I found the leaf in the above image on the sidewalk a couple weeks ago. I was struck by the way the raindrops remained on it like dew under the emerging summer sun. I took out my phone camera, knelt down, and zoomed in.

Then I thought, this image deserves a few words, too. I remembered the ancient art of haiku. Many people think of it as merely a poetic form in which you count syllables over three lines: five, seven, five. It is that, but it’s also more. Over the course of this form’s rich history, it has often been used to capture a meaningful and even meditative snapshot of a nature scene, a tiny stanza in which every word matters. Seventeen syllables to convey an image. This type of poem forces me to be concise, which is nice, because I’m naturally verbose.

So here’s my attempt:

Wind and rain came hard.

Green leaves floated down to rest.

Droplets cling like pearls.

I hope to see more under-the-radar, macro nature art like this in the future. I guess it’s like they say: look for it and you’ll find it. That’s the benefit of zooming in: you catch the details other people miss, and you never know which of those details may be meaningful or significant.