Could a travel blogger really be so uncompromising as to expect readers to live without any eye candy? I was getting nowhere like this.
It was a pleasant coffee shop with the usual paintings and photographs on the wall, which I seldom pay much attention to. For some reason, I did today. There was something unusual about the photographs. The photographer was a professor at a local college and was a member of a sub-culture that was trying to revive the pinhole camera.
You remember from your grade school days when a soothsayer prophesied a solar eclipse of the sun, and your teachers knew that some idiot would look at it regardless of their warnings. So they had you poke a hole in a patch of aluminum foil mounted in the front of an overturned cardboard box. On the other side of the box you taped a white screen. And there the solar crescent would appear, imaged merely by a hole.
To this day this seems a bit magical to me. Most optical equipment, including your eye, uses a curved lens and a diaphragm. With just a hole and an electronic detector or film you could take excellent photos of bright landscapes in the West. You do need a lot of light--that is the pinhole camera's main limitation. But it is superior to glass lenses in some ways--for instance, it has greater depth of field.
A beautiful photograph without debasing light by passing it through glass...an image without materials...only geometry. Ahh there's something that Plato could have loved. A beautiful photograph formed by a hole...a nothingness...there's something the Buddha would have approved of.
I felt inspired to put my anti-camera prejudices aside. And so I bought my first digital Brownie, and went off to discover how good a camera is at making me slow down and appreciate the funkiness of New Mexico.
This is my favorite sort of experience while traveling: watching the chemistry of time and place cause some kind of change in the traveler.
