I’ve never felt, much less understood the concept of, boredom. My eyes & brain never fail to keep me entertained. Yesterday I flew from RDM to DIA for a quick trip to visit my parents (more on that soon) and my flight left just before noon. Sue dropped me off several hours earlier because she had work to do, and could not manage to drop me off closer to my flight time. I checked my bag, read the newspaper… and then just left the airport with my iPod, my camera, and just went for a walk. The Redmond airport is east of the town of Redmond and pretty much cut-off from it by a set of railroad tracks. The tracks only have crossings at the north & south side of town, so the area around the airport is quite isolated. The landscape is typically central Oregon, with gnarled Junipers and spots of Cheatgrass amid the dry sandy soil. I walked a mile or so and then turned around to start heading back when I noted a storm squall bearing down on me. I made it maybe one-third of the way back to the shelter of the airport when it arrived with mixed rain and snow. My coat was in my checked bag, and all I had on for warmth was a lightweight pile vest. I sought the shelter of a Juniper tree and waited out the storm. The tree kept the wind and most of the precipitation off of me as I stood under it for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t bored. I was maybe 50 meters away from something I planned on photographing (some old piles of melting snow) and thought about how I would try and shoot these in a way that played tricks with scale. Are the images of Alaskan glaciers, or small piles of snow? After a while I started seeing small beauty in the tree that was giving me shelter from the storm.I had my 20mm f/1.7 lens on the G1, and fired off a few shots of the tree…
The storm abated and I was able to walk to the melting snow piles, and then finally amble back to the airport… with a couple of hours to spare before my flight. So if you ever find yourself bored, just open your eyes and look around – there is plenty of beauty, at every scale from the microscopic to the universal to behold.