Some thoughts about photography

So here's a thought that I want to share.  I'm not really using my blog now as a means to share my thoughts, but this one is particularly pertinent to my little adventure in photography.  I follow Pictureline on that one social media site that we all know about, and from time to time, they share guest posts from their regular website.  I don't read all of them, just the ones that catch my attention.  I saw one today that did.  You can read the whole article here, but here below is the part that struck me.

 I remembered a conversation I had with my grandmother. We were talking about her and my grandfather’s love for photography and how I was just starting to really get interested in it as well. We were walking on the beach one winter morning near her house in Door County, WI. It was a chilly morning, but the air was so still it didn’t feel very cold. While talking about nature and life, she told me that once she started taking pictures, she looked at everything she experienced in the world differently. She took time to notice the light and beauty of things more than she had before and that she really enjoyed that feeling.

I feel exactly the same as this guy's grandmother!  Since I've started really taking a lot of pictures, I notice the world around me a lot more.  I notice the clouds and lighting and landscapes and people and little details of things.  I notice angles of buildings and shadows cast by street lights and reflections of the sky in little puddles on the sidewalk.  I look for the character in the streets I'm driving on, thinking how I could attempt to capture it if I only had my camera on me.  I want to take my camera everywhere, just to capture the little things that strike me throughout the day.

I just now decided that my foray into photography can be likened to Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.  At the very end, he and Elizabeth are talking, and she asks him when he first started to love her.  This is what he says.

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation.  It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I HAD begun."

That's how I feel about photography.  I don't know when I started to love it or when it started to change the way I view the world around me.  I was in the middle before I realized that it was changing me.  That's all I really wanted to say, I guess.  I know that at least one person feels the same way, even if it's some random grandma in Wisconsin, and it's nice to know I'm not alone.