New Perspectives
How often do we go through life seeing things the same as we always do? Of course, that is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot happens during our day so if we looked at everything anew, we’d be exhausted before the day is through! Our perception needs to be restricted at times. When we are driving down the street, we don’t want to be oohing and aahing every little thing or we’d never get to our destination.
Yet, sometimes we continue this pattern when we don’t need to, or even when we could be seeing things in fresh ways. I think that is one reason why I like photographing from totally different angles at times. My Olympus E-3 has a tilting LCD that allows me to put the camera in all sorts of locations that would otherwise be hard to do. That gives me photographs that help me see the natural world from fresh eyes, and hopefully, other folks as well. In this photo taken in Acadia National Park, I also used what is called a full-frame fisheye lens to give an extremely wide-angle point of view and the curved “fisheye” perspective to further accentuate a new look at the woods of the park. This lens is so wide that you sometimes will pick up your feet or fingers in the shot, but it can be worth the effort to get such a different view.
In I Samuel 16:7, it says,”The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” While this is a passage about how Samuel should look at David, I think it applies to many things. Often we do see the wrong things and need God to give us direction, if we will listen, to see things differently. Sometimes we see nature purely from external appearances, especially as it affects us, and don’t look as deeply as perhaps we should as to what the natural world as God sees it, is really about.
— Rob Sheppard