set your photos free
/When Ray goes somewhere, anywhere, he has a large DSLR in one hand and an extra point-and-shoot in the other in case the big picture shows up on the Pacific while he’s focused on the Atlantic.
Plus, there are multiple camera lenses, a tripod, a monopod, assorted waist and shoulder bags, extra batteries, extra memory cards. To top off the look, he wears a multi-pocketed vest that makes him look like a cross between Indiana Jones, a Greek fisherman, a coupon redeemer at Bed Bath & Beyond, and an older and less flirty version of Ashton Kutcher taking photographs instead of just picking up chicks.
With all this paraphernalia along for the trip, I long ago stopped dragging my own 35mm camera when my red fashion-accessory Nikon crashed and split. Give me a technical device and you run the serious risk of seeing it dismembered right before your eyes.
Truth is, I’m an anti-photographer.
Ray’s theory: see it, love it, see it again in the comfort of your own home.
My theory: see it, love it, set it free. Free is not living inside a heap of plastic or pleading from inside a picture frame.
Despite my wet blanket attitude, I know a great thing when I see it. And our trip to Machu Picchu was going to be a great thing, so even I packed a tiny camera just in case Ansel Adams Kutcher was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was up to me to return home with the proof.
So there I was in the Inca ruins having a darn good time and making a record of it. I avoided the hard shots: the intricate details of the architecture, the wrinkled Andean women in their wide Crayola-colored skirts, the grinning mountain kids. Instead, I focused on the stuff I couldn’t destroy because it was too picture perfect. Like all of Machu Picchu.
Suddenly, I was looking at the world the way photographers do, with a big barrier of glass that prevents any real connection. Wait, I take it back. That was the old me. The new me, weapon in hand, was seeing things in a way no one had ever seen before. The colors, the shapes, the misinterpreted angles, the hidden meanings all appeared before my lens as if waiting for the right person to reveal the true depth of the Inca civilization.
When we got home, the camera buff disappeared into his office to become one with his Photoshop software. I knew this meant he was doing things that make older women look bad. If real life can be enhanced to look more enticing, what chance does a fading female have of accepting herself without plastic surgery?
And yet, like a good facelift, the results were hard to argue with. I was invited to a showing with popcorn because he wanted me to linger and fawn. But wait, something was missing.
Me: Where are the photos I dropped on your desk to be uploaded? Where are my shots of the famous Sun Temple, the sacred mountains, the gods that I swear appeared to me in flesh and blood?
Ray: Well, better hold onto your popcorn, this is going to be a bumpy ride.
In other words, was that Machu Picchu in the clouds or maybe an anthill encircled in white spider webs? Was that a llama grazing on the terraced land, or maybe a deer chewing bushes in my own front yard?
“The Inca empire wasn’t built in a day,” I huffed, and retired to my own office after slamming my camera back on the shelf. But first I removed the memory card to set my rotten images free.
Then, after Ray went to bed, I snuck back to his office and marveled—in the comfort of my own home—at the wonders we had seen and the wonders we could see over and over again.