Soot-drawn Totoro!

Secret alley

There's a little alley not far from his apartment. I darted inside to take pictures. He studied the bus schedule.

We make a good pair.

Tree gnome

Another doodle for the graphic worm.

Rukia

I don't actually watch Bleach, but apparently it's the popular thing these days. I've been spending some time on theOtaku recently and thought I'd come up with something to submit there.

On details

I find myself photographing details.

Details are the thing, you know—they're everywhere, they're tiny, and they're terribly, terribly important. Details are what we're comprised of, what we are. Details are how we experience the world.

It doesn't always seem that way, I think. We're tricked into thinking that details are hard, that details are elusive, that details are something that we must work to see. That isn't true at all. Not exactly.

I walk outside, a bright cold day. The wind bites at my face—a thousand icy pinkpricks!—and dances with my hair. The sidewalk is ice, snow beaten down by a hundred sets of footsteps. Salt residue draws intricate patterns on the concrete steps. This is my experience! These are the details that make up this moment.

But there are other details, too: the cars speeding by on the street. The plastic-sleeved pennysaver, half-buried in week-old snow. The dirty, salt-wet slush in the apron of the driveway. The mashed, frozen gingko fruits that have fallen and been trampled by the tree.

In this moment, I drink in only the first set of details. The rest are glossed over, ignored by the tiny imps that file away my memories. They still exist, of course, and they're still important, in their way. Some days I remember only the ugly, the mundane—but this afternoon, sun-drunk and happy, my brain tastes the world through a rose-flavored straw.

And this becomes the trick of it. This moment, here with my camera, this is what I wish to capture. But to take a picture of everything I see simply will not work. What my brain can filter out, the camera shows starkly. What I experience—the heady, lovely world this winter day—is, in-camera, pale and washed out, soiled by ugliness I hardly see.

So to capture the moment we experience, to show others the sights that so mesmerises us—it is a difficult task.

Rarely can you show the whole picture and reproduce the whole experience. The world is too varied, too multi-faceted. You cannot simply show an objective picture of a thing to someone and expect them to understand the thing. The signal-to-noise ratio is simply too low. What our eyes, and our souls, can interpret, the camera cannot.

And so, we find that the truth of our experience is revealed more often by careful close-ups than it is by sweeping panoramas.

I do not wish to show what the tree looks like. I wish to show how I see the tree.

Curly bits

Sgnomes!

(snow+gnomes, get it?)