Sammy
Sammy is a Havanese, belonging to a cottager who often brings him to the village so that he can play with the girls at the baseball diamond.
Like most small dogs, Sammy does not appear to have any sense of being one bit less of a dog that the big 'uns. He gets right in there and plays his heart out.
Can you guess which of these pictures were taken with the $5000 camera and lens, and which were taken with the $500 camera and lens? (scroll down to the end of the pictures for the answer).
(first five are with the big camera, last five are with the baby camera)
1956 classic
...with a brand-new engine inside, and some creative, attentive restoration and decoration applied to the body. This truck belongs to an artist in the village and is completely drivable, with a tablet computer that takes over much of the dashboard's responsibilities.
a visit to the antique store
...with Ned as a welcome crew. Ned is a young, huge, gentle Bernese Mountain dog-Great Pyrenees cross
ditch plants
So, the other day, on my run, some roadside flowers caught my eye. Later that same morning, I retraced my steps, camera in hand, to take some photographs.
I climbed over the crash barrier and descended the stony scree, squatted down to ''eye level'' with the flowers and found myself in possibly the most beautiful of miniature forests.
From the road, to the drivers zipping by at 80 km/hr just metres away from where I perched in the dirt, I must have looked like a mad person, fending off deerflies and aiming a ridiculously long lens at some weeds. Because that's what they were, essentially: oxeye daisies, and orange and yellow hawkweed.
But my camera told me a different story altogether. A wide-open aperture allowed me to focus selectively and blur the background into colourful abstracts. Tiny changes in angle provided me with an abundance of focal points. I could have spent an hour there, happily framing and photographing. I came back home with a treasure-trove of imagery.
I scrambled back out of the ditch and up to the road, and as the traffic roared and rumbled past, I thought about how our different perspectives truly shape how each of us sees the world, and that even the smallest, most insignificant things have their own beauty and merit, if we but choose to see it.
