she can't say no

a shuttergirl story
Once upon a time I resisted the idea of digital photography. I liked film (secretly still do), and working in a darkroom with chemical smells and tongs and red lights - and then I bought my first digital 4 mp camera - it was love at first sight. I haven't been without a camera in my purse since then. But I've had many camera loves and I admit I've been fickle. Craving excitement, I have heartlessly abandoned the reliable-familiar, in favor of newer, sleeker, younger. I've even passed my old camera loves on to others who hopefully shared passionate shutterbugging and remained faithful.

digital surprises
As we sped along the mountain roads last evening on the way home from Santa Fe, an unusual rainbow seemed to shoot up from the ground. Since I wasn't driving, I whipped out my latest camera love (a compact 12MP Canon) and started shooting from the opened car window. Today I reviewed the pictures I'd quickly taken. There were lots of swishing telephone poles, trees, fences, the rainbow far away - and this!

I hadn't noticed a man in armor on horseback and thought it might be one of those spooky photo mysteries that movies and television ghost shows feature. You know, the figure in the room that wasn't seen except after the film was developed. That ball of mist in the woods last month. But no. We were speeding past the Onate Center. Don Juan Onate being the Spanish conquistador who brought "civilization" to the savages (and tortured and forced Christianity on them - but that's another horror story). Onate aside (and I still don't know why a statue to honor him was ever erected), I like the surprise picture. And the orange behemoth  that loomed in the parking lot of the Farmer's Market on Saturday.

Like the Japanese poets of old, I want to own the sights I see and put them in my knapsack (or purse). They used words in pithy poems, I collect images in concise cameras.