Michael P. Young Blog: From the Corner of Your Eye

Throughout the history of man there have been quite a few learned men that have acknowledged life's varied "still small voices". You may know some of them...a woman's intuition... gut feelings...the Holy Spirit...

I'd like to introduce you to one of the others. Like the other still small voices, I don't always listen to it. And I usually regret it when I don't. That voice I'm talkiing about is the corner of the photographers eye...you know...the corner of your eye that catches a scene and the photographer in you tells you "Oohh, that would make a cool picture!" as you do a double take of the scene. If I'm lucky, I'll actually have some sort of camera with me (see Chase Jarvis' " The Best Camera Is The One That's With You" ). And if I'm luckier still, I'll actually have time to stop and attempt a snap. Unfortunately, I can't count the number of times I passed up on the opportunity to take the snap, or I didn't trust in the small corner of my eye talking to me.

But on occassion, I did listen. Here are a few of the snaps I have taken in the past as a result of the Corner of My Eye.

This one was taken while we were in Dallas. My wife was at a training, so I had the kids with me as we walked in Downtown Dallas. As we were walking, the corner of my eye caught a glimpse of this cool building. As it was framed nicely between the trees, I told the kids to hold up, and after dealing with their "omg, dad, not another picture" sighs, I pulled my Nikon D70 up to my eye and snapped this shot. To this day, it is one of my favorites.

Photo by Michael P. Young – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons.

The next shot I call God's Thumb. It was near the time that the movie "Holes" came out. In that movie was a small mountain out in the middle of nowhere called God's thumb. I could see a slight resemblance to a thumb. However, when I was walking the canyons of Bandelier National Monument in Los Alamos, I caught this scene out of the corner of my eye and said to myself, "Now that's a thumb!"

Photo by Michael P. Young – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons.

This next one will probably get me in trouble. We were driving back home from a vacation. As I was changing lanes and looking over my shoulder, you guessed it, I caught this image of my wife and son sleeping out of the corner of my eye. The "like mother like son" moment was too precious. Shot this picture over my shoulder...had to keep my eyes on the road, so framing wasn't perfect.

Photo by Michael P. Young – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons.

The last one I want to share with you is one I took way too many years ago when I was a kid. I was out playing around with my dad's Kodak Retinette 1A manual camera. As I turned around I caught out of the corner of my eye my dog, Champ, cooling down in a bed of this flowery ground cover we had in our yard. I set aperture and shutter and snapped this shot. For my birthday, my mom and dad had the shot blown up and framed. I still have it to this day hanging in my studio.