When ignorance is blissful -a fish tale

Click on image above to see larger version. Read what follows
or jump right to the heart of the matter ;-)

The slideshow is here. (Quicktime required.)

The albums are:

One of the things I hope my recent reawakening to photography will do for me is to help me see the world as it is.

It's funny - we strive through much of our life to learn to bring structure and order to our world. Thus when I look at the night sky I see stars that fall into the familiar patterns of the constellation and I am always irritated when Hollywood paints a fake night sky made up of randomly scatterd dots of light. That, I suppose, is how it looks to those ignorant of the patterns.

And so it is with birds. I can't identify them all, but I strive to. And there is some obvious practical value to this - to all such ordering and knowledge. But there is a downside as well. We lose our sense of awe. We no longer see the miracle that is so obvious in this incredibly vast wonderland of hoptoads, birds, animals, plants, fish and stars.

So I strive to recapture it. But how? We can't unlearn. Photography - especially when an image is taken into the "darkroom" to study, manipulate, and improve - becomes a path to seeing things as they are simply because you find yourself focusing on minute details.

A simpler path is to start fresh - and so it is with me and fish. I once kept a small aquarium, but I was never very good at handling the inevitable deaths that occured. So I abandoned the practice. But my son-in-law Paul keeps tropical fish and does it right and when I was looking at his aquarium the other night I decided to see if I could photograph them using the available light. (A flash would obviously reflect right back.) The results are linked below.

My point? I know nothing about fish. There are maybe two dozen seen here. I can't name them. I don't want to be able to. I want to see them through the eyes of awe. I want to view them as a child. I want to stare in wonder at their colors, shapes, and motions. I want to grasp how it is they move in this fluiid medium. And like the Ancient Mariner, I want to bless them all.

I can do that sometimes with the birds and the stars and other things - but so often I don't see the Chickadee or the Herring Gull any more because I -well, I do see the Chickadee and the Herring GUll. That is, I have identified these before and so I have a preconceived notion of what they are, what they look like, and how they act. This preconceived notion replaces true seeing. If that doesn't make sense to you, all I can say is it's something that was revealed to me as I learned to draw about 10 years ago. As anyone who has attempted to draw can tell you - these preconceived notions get in the way of true seeing and you draw what is in your head rather than what is before your eyes.

So if you you must know what these fish are - go get a book, or if you know him, ask Paul. As for me, I just want to see them in blissful ignorance ;-)

Linked below are a Quicktime slideshow and two web albums - all using the same pictures. If you don't have a fast connection, I would suggest the smaller album. The slide show and the larger album will take a significant time to download over a modem.

The albums take the simple form of a page of thumbnails and then individual pages for each picture. Click on a thumbnail, it takes you to the big picture which includes buttons for "previous," "next," and "up." That last means "back up to the thumbnails."

Each album is available in a small version suitable for those whose screen resolution is 800 pixels wide. (The picture with this entry is 500 pixels wide.) Small is also a good choice if you're on a modem.

The large version looks better if you have a higher resolution and a fast connection - cable or DSL.

The slideshow is here. (Quicktime required.)

The albums are:

Paul's Aquarium (small)

Paul's Aquarium (large)

Posted by Greg Stone at April 5, 2004 05:37 AM