A mindfulness exercise without your camera - tracing three different kinds of light to renew seeing habits
The sighting of UFOs has been confirmed by the Pentagon this year. Maybe this might be the time to think about possible ethics for a potential encounter, like the sociologist Frank Adloff from Erlangen just recently did in the German Philosophy Magazine. To train yourself in mindfulness as a photographer, the search for an encounter of the third kind is quite helpful. There might be no broad historic impetus like above, but your findings could be no less spectacular.
What is this search about? What is searched for? Leaving your camera behind at home can be a challenge for photographers. Especially when there is beautiful light that day falling through the trees. But such a day is only without the camera a perfect condition to possibly have an encounter of the third kind.
'Now known', Regensburg, 2021 © Dr. Christine Lehr
Finding the first kind is not that difficult. She comes directly from the sun in rays on branches, shimmers softly through tender leaves, and makes the forest sparkle in magical green tones. She twinkles through mellow fir needles, dances over white elder umbels, makes the little legs of black beetles glimmer bluish. This first kind of light.
The second one is closely related to the first one. She is her shadow, without which the reflections of light from the leaves and fir needles did not have any nuances for our eyes. But a duality of direct light and its shadow is only superficially the photographic matrix wherein a picture is to be composed.
The third kind is the unconditional ingredient for the magic, the gradual play of light and shadow. What might this third kind be? Where to find it most likely? Is she always there? Does she scatter in the between of light and shadow? Do I recognize her by her tenderness, her softness? When I found her, does she stay?
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