Making Weighty Matters Light And Light Matters Weighty
As it is with making photographs, so it is with the pictures we make of our lives…
That pictures should be balanced is another general compositional rule. Subject elements are weighted and assigned different degrees of importance depending on their size and their tone or color. (Patricia Caulfield in Capturing The Landscape With Your Camera)
I assigned weight to elements of the three pictures in this post by using color selectively. My choices about where to assign weight were deliberate, but in our lives we often assign weight to objects or events out of habit or predisposition, or because assigning weight in one way or another serves a purpose of which we are unaware. Thus we make weighty matters light and light matters weighty, and sometimes we know it and sometimes we don’t.
Making difficult weighty matters light slips easily into avoidance or denial. Making difficult light matters weighty slips easily into drama or victimhood.
One friend had both hips replaced, another had a double mastectomy. Neither of them gave life-consuming weight to those events, choosing to also give weight to the love and support they discovered around them, to the care and competence of their surgeons, and to their own faith, courage and resilience. So it is in the photo above, where the large gourd at the top would carry great weight, even though it is halved, had I not altered the color. I chose to give the gourd less weight in favor of a different element of the picture. “…pictures should be balanced…”
So it seems useful to ask, “To what in my life am I assigning too much weight, or too little, and how might I restore a sense of balance, freeing myself from the risk of avoidance and denial or drama and victimhood?”
Tags: Acceptance, attitudes, denial, hip replacement, mastectomy, Peace of Mind, Perception, Photography, selective color, victimhood
“To what in my life am I assigning too much weight, or too little, and how might I restore a sense of balance, freeing myself from the risk of avoidance and denial or drama and victimhood?”
If we answered this question honestly, a lot of our problems would be reduced to a manageable size. It is important to get the perspective right!
Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks for stopping by Geetali. You point out that “perspective” is an underlying theme here. It seems to be larger in my thinking than just this post because last week I wrote about My Place In The Grand Scheme Of Things, which is also about perspective. Hmmm…