Perspective

I keep getting distracted, so I haven’t had a real dinner yet. My triceps are extra sore today. My mesh chair is imprinting a pattern on my sockless foot. And I am falling out of love with La Croix. …and I just went down a reddit rabbit hole for five minutes. I really ought to stop doing that.

I finally planted the Chocolate Cherry Coleus that I first intended to. Growing conditions will be more ideal than they were when I first planted the heirloom variety, but it is still looking like we won’t have Spring this year.

Winter will bleed into Summer.

I just sold my 85mm portrait lens.

If you don’t know what it’s like to use an 85mm portrait lens, that’s alright. I don’t really know how to explain it except to say that it’s much more zoomed in than your phone camera, but nothing like a telescope.

As a metaphor, an 85mm lens is like an intimate, attentive perspective. It’s moderately more zoomed in than normal human vision. A phone camera is the opposite; it’s wide. A phone camera captures a scene, not a portrait. Much more of the background is included. (Unless you’re using portrait mode which zooms in.)

Selling the 85mm is like giving up one of my ways of relating to people. It’s a shift in perspective.

I replaced it with a 100mm macro lens whose primary function is for close up images of small things. For people, it’s a detailed look at their features–an eye, pursed lips, a finger resting, the lines of a palm. Looking this close is not intimate; it is analytical. The image of the whole person–their gestalt–is gone. There are only parts, each one isolated within a frame.

Of course, that’s just with people. There are some things that are smaller than people. Like the young plants growing by my window.

*a plant in an overgrown garden*, *100mm macro lens*

I’ve decided to narrow my focus. To look more closely at the things that I will grow.

Farewell 85mm.

For now, I’ll be taking portraits with my 50mm lens, the focal length that resembles normal human vision, a more familiar perspective.