Finding the Light
By Tina Godby
14 Jul 2009
My uncle had a stroke right around Thanksgiving a few years back. His brother died a short time after. Neither were out of their 50s yet.
I looked at how sudden death can be and realized that, while I enjoyed my job as a store manager at a children's store, it was not my dream. I wasn't even sure if I had a dream.
I have always been the family photographer. I always had the camera on vacations, at holidays or just hanging around the house. I just felt something magical in taking a picture. So this is it, this is my dream. To be a photographer. A good one. Since I worked full-time and had two children I didn't see enough already I wasn't sure how I could study photography and balance the rest of my life. I saw an ad for NYIP and decided that distance learning was the right thing for me.
One of the first exercises was to walk around your neighborhood and rediscover the beauty in it. To look at everything as a visitor seeing it for the first time. I thought, "Whatever. What is this teaching me about the mechanics of photography?" I skipped it. I went on and studied ahead. I did my first assignment and sent it in. I just wanted to get the basics over.
Then, one beautiful autumn day, I decided to walk to my son's school to pick him up instead of drive. It is only a block away so its a bit embarrassing that I drive anyway. Walking to the school without distractions from the radio or cell phone opened my mind. I decided to really look at the world around me, to do that simple exercise of looking at my neighborhood as a visitor. Autumn afternoons in Lexington, KY are some of the finest. The sun is bright, the sky is clear and there are amazing colors everywhere. It had rained just briefly, more of a sprinkle. The sun caught in the little bubbles of water was amazing. I've seen it before but didn't really think about the light of it. The lessons I just studied touched briefly on light, how we see it and how the camera sees it. I use to only see beauty in people. I enjoyed the sights around me, but never had that breath-taking moment others seemed to enjoy at sunsets, at the beach or just hiking in nature.But now here I was having my breath taken away by raindrops on a golden leaf.
Looking for the light in photography taught me to see the beauty in every day life.
