The Glow Of Discovery

It’s Why You Bring Your Tools

You take your camera with you “Just in case”. It may never come out of the bag, or get lifted to your eye, but you never know when you might see something good.

There’s a really cool event this time of year at one of the biggest parks in Richmond, Maymont. The park began life as the private residence of one of the city’s wealthiest families. With gorgeous Italian and Japanese-style gardens, it’s a beautiful location year-round. In the late fall, they string those gardens with lights for “Garden Glow”. All the beauty takes on a fantasy aspect as you walk through the gardens. The challenge for me is that it’s night, and the lights of the display are the only light available. My trusty FujiFilm FinePix can handle a lot of situations, but low light is a challenge. I own a monopod (somewhere) but I never remember it till I’m at Maymont. So, I’m looking for whatever I can get.

Here’s why you bring your camera.

I took a couple dozen photos that night. Two-thirds are blurry messes. The rest are mostly “Well, maybe I can salvage something out of this”. And then there are four, maybe five, that have some potential. Anyone who has been into photography for long will know that those kinds of ratios of good to useless/boring images are normal. As I was scanning through the images, I came to this one and stopped dead. Because it was glorious. And I had no idea where that came from. There’s a beautiful pond/lake at the center of the Japanese garden. It’s one of my favorite places to shoot at Maymont. This looked like one of the reflection shots I’ve taken many times. But it was…wrong. Somehow. Maybe you’ll see it sooner than I did, but it took several minutes before my brain processed what I was seeing.

Take a look.

Did you see it? I took the picture with my camera rotated to the vertical, but this showed up horizontal. so what looked like a reflection (top to bottom) to me was, in fact, a reflection left to right. Oriented properly:

The longer I look at both, the more I like the “wrong” one. The view is familiar while also being surrealistic. It is not what I intended, nor even what I saw in my viewfinder. That’s the great thing about creativity and photography. Sometimes you get surprised.