If time travel would be a thing I would simply invite you to join me on a journey back to 1999. To a small island in western Norway, about 6000 inhabitants. The island exists, time travel does not (yet). So let’s just assume we are in the year 1999.
IPhones didn’t exist, and even the age of digital cameras just started. Damn, that makes me sound ancient!! But basically we were still taking pictures on film, had to bring it to the shop to get it developed and then hope that focus, angle, lighting, etc on the printed photo turned out as planned.
I was a teenager at that time, living on that aforementioned island. Spending all my weekends and most weekdays somewhere outdoors. The school I attended was brilliant! No exaggerated focus on studying dry theory, more to prepare young people for the real life. With a lot of cool stuff organized for us – like workshops on anything imaginable. I do not want to bore you with all the details, but I basically ended up in a photography workshop I never intended to attend. Nothing against it, but the multi-day canoeing trip that was offered in parallel looked so much more appealing … unfortunately no seat left. So grudgingly I joined the ‘boring team’. Taking my camera, a few films and the instructions and went to the local beach.
Reading the instructions was really strange. The leaflet told me to find and capture things like: something linear, something with a strong contrast, something unusual, something S-shaped, something with a repetitive pattern and so on and so forth. The start felt really awkward! After a while though I warmed up to this. And started to look at my surroundings in a very different way. Almost as when applying a filter that removes the obvious and superficial, to uncover the hidden magic behind something as ordinary as a tree trunk (like the birds head tree below, found in Reinhardswald in Germany), a pebble, the seafront or a cloud … and I never looked at the world the same way after that.
There is so much to discover, everywhere, anytime! I would love to invite you to find your own viewpoint filter, your own perspectives. Happy to lend you mine as a starting point. Go out, explore, and get inspired by all the little miracles around us. And if you want to share your findings, your observations, your discovery stories – I’d love to hear about them in the comments or on social media!
PS: eventually I even won the little competition linked to the workshop in 1999. Not because I took the most sophisticated and technically perfect picture. But because I found the most unusual perspective – a little spot at the beach that looked more like the Caribbean than the Norwegian Atlantic coast. It was a small thing but gave me the confidence and motivation to further practice – and I never stopped since!