How to photograph the mountains of your mind.

 

“Photography is an art of observation.  It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”  Elliott Erwitt

After all the Christmas celebrations with family, presents, a tree with candles, games, too much to eat, silly jokes and too much chocolate, I can’t tell you how excited I was to come back to my French home.

Back to the mountains of the French Alps, the snow and the cold (as opposed to the all penetrating British damp).  At last, I’m facing Mont Blanc.

(Just to be sure, I am actually talking about a mountain and not about those very nice fountain pens.  I never could quite fathom why fountain pens should be called after a mountain – after all they can use virtually any colour ink EXCEPT white, which wouldn’t usually show up.  What’s that all about?)

Mont Blanc, (French for the White Mountain), approximately 4810 metres (15,781 feet) high, the highest mountain in Western Europe, the highest mountain in the Alps, is the 11th highest mountain in the world.

I am lucky enough to have a drop dead gorgeous view of this beautiful mountain from my balcony.

Every day, I wake up, open the shutters and look towards Mont Blanc.  It’s a bit of a ritual.  It always makes me happy to see Mont Blanc.

Most days, it is bathed in sunlight.  The snow glows yellow in the early morning, turns blinding white in the heat of the day and eventually fades to a beautiful rose pink as the sun sets.

I’m so keen on trying to capture its moods that I take a photo, or several, of it nearly every day. I have done so, when I’m here, for the last two years.

Learning something new is very good for your brain

 I’m not very good at taking photos.  I have never really understood how to use a proper camera – all that stuff about settings and exposure.

My son takes wonderful pictures on his iPhone.  So, I abandoned my proper camera when I got an iPhone identical to his. It is such a simple way of taking photos.  So much easier I thought.

Alas, even with something as simple as an iPhone, I am bad at taking photos.

I thought I had better start learning about photography or I was doomed to a lifetime of terrible photos.  Anyway, learning something new is very good for your brain and helps you retain your cognitive functions as you age.

Practising is very trying

It’s all about seeing things – the way that you look at the world.  The ability to imagine a shot, to see the composition, to adjust your position, changing everything until it’s just right – until you achieve the nirvana of a perfect shot.

My nirvana is the perfect shot of Mont Blanc.

After you have the vision in your mind, the books tell you it’s all about trial and error – you have to practise.  If you want to be good at painting, you paint.  If you want to be good at writing, you write.

So, I tried to be good at photography.

I tried zooming the lens.  I tried taking a photo with the focus in the foreground and then tried it with the focus in the background.

I tried taking a larger photo and cropping it.

I tried photographing the blasted mountain early in the morning and then late in the dusk, when the snow is pink.

I tried photographing it in the middle of the day, even though that is not advised because the sun shines on the snow creating a mass of undistinguishable white.

I tried photographing reflections of the mountain in a lake.

I tried photos with clouds and photos with blue sky.

I tried taking photos of it through the branches of a tree.  I’ve tried photographing it in winter and in summer.

I tried taking photos before eating chocolate and then after eating chocolate.

The insane search for the perfect, elusive shot

 I tried so hard, yet I never felt I deserved the chocolate.

I couldn’t get it. In more than 2 years of photographing that great big white mountain, I didn’t get the perfect shot.

I couldn’t take a picture that captured the magnificence of this massive lump of rock, the one that expressed the sheer beauty of the snow-clad peaks rising against the blue sky, the one where the setting sun kisses the mountain good night and tucks it in with a rose-coloured blanket.

I couldn’t get the picture where the mountain glowed as it did in my mind.

The best I could do was to take a moderate sort of shot, accidentally.

This was ridiculous.  You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Time to change the focus: an epiphany

When I looked out so eagerly this morning, I was disappointed by the mass of grey clouds hiding the mountain.  No photos today then.

But then, the epiphany, the flash of enlightenment.  It was like suddenly getting the point of meditation after going through the motions for so many months.

I don’t need to see the mountain.  I’ve been away.  I haven’t seen the mountain for some months and the weather is set to be murky for quite a few days more.

But I have the idea of it tucked away, glowing and comforting.  I can just call it up whenever I want to.  I don’t even need to look at my ridiculously bad photos.

It was me I needed to change – the way I looked at taking photographs.  The way I looked at what I was seeing.

The lessons of really bad photographs

Taking all those photos had taught me something else. Nothing to do with the photographs. They taught me how to look at that great big chunk of rock.

I saw it changing through the seasons.

I saw it gleaming in the moonlight.

I saw it menacing bad weather.  I saw it heralding good weather.

I watched the cloud formations above it. (There are some which only form at the top of mountains. They’re amazing.  They look just like a contact lens and they’re called lenticular clouds.)

I saw a mountain just as described in any number of books.  (For instance, Heidi, in the girls’ classic by Johanna Sypri is captivated by the setting sun turning snow to pink.)

And what I saw made me happy.

The pictures are in your mind

It was so irritating when I didn’t nail it, a nagging reminder of another failure, the picture that didn’t quite make it.  I was seeking a technical perfection.  I was trying to capture a feeling.

But I was restricting myself from seeing, by paying attention to the wrong things.

It’s not about the mountain and it’s not about the photographs.

It’s a way of looking at the world, of being observant, of seeing things.

It’s all to do with the pictures in your mind.  It’s about a change of focus, a change in your state of being.

It was the looking that made me happy.

Although there is still a bit of me that says that concentrating on the technique and making better photos will also make me happy, the photographs no longer have to be perfect.

The feel of places, people and possessions

 This epiphany started me looking in a new way, at people, at places, at possessions.

Becoming more aware of these things, makes you more aware of what makes you happy.

Not super-amazing, ecstatic, I’ve just seen a pop star, screaming type of happy.

Just a feeling of well-being and a recognition of the roles that particular people, places and possessions play in your life.  A type of mindfulness.

Climb the mountain in your mind

 Why don’t you climb the mountain too?  The one inside your head.

Your mountain may be nothing to do with a real mountain, but it will be about the pictures in your mind.

When you change your focus, you see the things you saw before, but, somehow, they are different.  You are different, because now you look at them differently.

You see them in more depth, in greater clarity, in greater detail.

It just doesn’t arrive from the direction that you expected.  It comes from the concentration, the thought and effort you put into it.

Photograph the mountains of your mind: here’s how

You can try it.  Take your phone or your camera and photograph people who make you happy, the places that make you happy and the possessions that make you happy – chocolate for instance, your dog, some delicious wine or even mountains.

Or better still, photograph the things that would make somebody else happy.

You will put down the burden of striving for perfection and still reap contentment and satisfaction. You are all the richer for the experience you have gained.

And if you’re very clever or maybe very lucky, you might get to learn how to take great photos too.

I’m afraid that I don’t know about that yet.

 

Rosemary Bointon has lived and worked in 12 different countries. Having sailed the Atlantic in her own boat, her passion is thinking up new adventures and challenges for older people to do NOW, to help them have loads of fun in longer, more fulfilled and active lives. (But she’s not planning on climbing Mont Blanc – the ski lift is quite high enough.) You can find her on https://medium.com/@RosemaryB, on Twitter at https://twitter.com @Agingchallenges and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/longlifefunlife/

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