(Or not. I've described this before and declared it not to be insomnia. I'm OK with that, too).
Nice days happening now that autumn has arrived. For some reason, instead of going to the gym or on a ride, I just decided to head out on my street bike and see where I took myself.
I ended up in a cemetery I had no idea existed in Xinyi district. I was looking for one of the trail heads for elephant hill. I found it, but also found that even though the weather is cooler, it was still too hot, considering I wasn't dressed for a hike, to go up trail.
When I returned to where I locked my bike, I looked around and noticed the cemetery on a hillside. I hadn't noticed it before because the foreground was dominated by a parking lot, and the gate to the cemetery was kinda hidden (to a foreigner) between the parking lot and the road leading to the psychiatric hospital.
It was a great late afternoon to wander around in an unkempt, very neglected cemetery. It was hot, but there was also some nice breezes. I've given up any identity as a "photographer" hobbyist a long time ago, but for the first time since then I "saw" things, and still toting a point and shoot in my rucksack, I took some shots.
I gave up shooting for a number of reasons. The two foremost being the advent of the misnomered "smart phone" (granted the phones are probably smarter than the majority of the users), which invited everyone to take pictures of fucking everything and posting them fucking everywhere. They've largely rendered my type of photography irrelevant. You have to be really, really good to capture photos that stand out.
The other reason being that I just stopped "seeing" shots. That's what photography was to me. It was about seeing, noticing, finding. Visually that stopped happening. And I'm glad it stopped as part of the process of dropping away of ego and identity.
It's no great accomplishment since ego and identity are still very much here, but it was important in shedding away many of the superficial egos and identities that form our being and karma.
Photos added in September 2019 after downloading them from Canon IXUS 860 IS earlier in the summer 2019 (direct from flash drive, camera battery had long since died):
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| 3:53 p.m. |
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| 3:56 p.m. - digital point and shoot black & white quality still leaves much to be desired. |
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| 4:02-4:07 p.m. |
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| 4:12 p.m. - I considered rotating this photo counter-clockwise, thinking it was askew due to my compositional problem resulting from apparently having one leg shorter than the other (as evidenced only in photos), but then realized the faint outline of Taipei 101 is the ultimate indicator of how askew a photo is. Admittedly, 101 isn't completely upright (and would require a clockwise rotation to correct), but I realized this was taken on an incline and the composition is just fine. |
