Cameras and the Right Filters

I am not quite sure when I became enamored with cameras and the art of photography.  It may have come from the fascination I had as a kid whenever my Dad pulled out his trusty Kodak Vigilant Junior Six-20 folding bellows type camera that was made by the Eastman Kodak company between 1940 and 1948.  It could also have been the exciting high tech, new Kodak Starmite camera that replaced the Vigilant Junior as the family camera or more possible, the Kodak Instamatic 100 that was the very first camera that I could ever call my own!

I quickly became known as “The Photographer” in the family and practically never left home without my trusty Instamatic at my side.  The real leap though, came in 1970 when I purchased the camera of my dreams in the form of a Minolta SRT 101 SLR. That camera brought me into a whole new world and level of photography.

In the fall of 1970, I began taking photography classes in high school and never looked back after that!  In my two years at the Santa Rosa Junior College, I took every photography class that was available and later on at Sonoma State University completed all the advanced Photography courses that they offered.  Following those on-site school courses, I took various mail-order (pre-internet days) specialty classes through the years, subscribed to numerous photography magazines and began to build up my hardbound and paperback book photography library!

Throughout the years I continually experimented with various photo accessories, all kinds of color and black and white films, different lens sizes and types and a variety of photography styles and subjects.  I must also freely admit, that it didn’t hurt that I had a very attractive girlfriend who later became my wife, who was most comfortable in front of my lens and had an adventurous side about her.  This accounted for her being a  more-than-willing subject for a vast majority of my different school projects, in all kinds of locations, and for test shots when I was experimenting with new poses, equipment, locations or creative ideas that I dreamed up.  In this (and most other regards), she and I were a match made in heaven!

Now… I said all that to say, that in the course of my photography development, I became interested in the unique and/or differing effects that FILTERS can have with the various types of film that I had loaded in my camera.  As you can imagine, over the years I amassed quite a collection of FILTERS.  Then when I switched from Minolta cameras to Canon in the early ‘80’s and its smaller filter size lens system, I was forced to duplicate most of the FILTERS that I already had.

I became infatuated with the various ways in which a FILTER could completely change the looks, the mood, the tones and the meaning of the scene I was recording as an image on the color or black and white films I used.  One of my all-time favorites was a shot I captured with color film of a sea-gull flying over the ocean at Bodega Bay California.  I was using a red FILTER at the time and the finished product projected a red sky with white clouds and a darkly colored bird in full flight, soaring overhead.  We proudly hung a framed 16 X 20 picture of that shot in our living room for years… until the red in the sky faded away.

In my Christian walk over the years, I have also come to understand how most of us look at the world and/or certain events in our lives, through a system of pre-set FILTERS in our minds eye.  This became especially evident to me when Piper’s health began to deteriorate in 2007.  It was an eye-opening time for me when I began to realize how differently the people around us saw our situation and the varieties of ways in which they dealt with it.

I’ve told the story on multiple occasions of my experience on my knees in the lawn chemical storage section in the back of the outdoor garden department at the South Tulsa Home Depot where I was working, after receiving the first negative and heart-stopping diagnosis of Piper’s initial brain scans in 2007.  At that moment in time, I gave our situation and everyone of Piper’s needs to the Lord and never looked back.

When Piper and I read verses of scripture like Jeremiah 29:11 when the Lord declared, “I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for” (The Message Bible), we simply took Him at His Word… and I was amazed when many of the folks I expected to agree with us… DIDN’T!

Through the years of our fight for Piper’s life, I began to understand that although we may be looking at the exact same scripture… many people see it or understand it differently.  A good example of this was the difference between Piper and her immediate family.  Although they all came from the same stock and family Christian experience, they many times saw things differently.

In many respects they were all a very intellectual group of individuals… but somewhere down the line, as her faith and trust in the Lord grew, Piper, when it came to her personal faith in the Word of God, made the decision to remove some of the customary FILTERS of things that ask questions like, “What if?” - “But?”- “How?” and cause us to stop and make statements like, “I can’t afford that” or “that’s not possible.”  In Piper’s (and my) understanding, those thoughts inhibited the Lord to work miracles in her life.  And like I stated earlier in this post, Piper had a more adventurous side about her that enabled her to step out in trust of the Lord.  Some called it foolishness, but we always saw it as faith.

I learned in many interactions with different folks in the places where we lived across the country, that people all sit in various places along the spectrum of faith… and I believe that it is the personal FILTERS that we have in operation at any given time, that dictates where we fall along that line.  One of the harder lessons I learned was when I realized the reason why we kept butting heads with some of those who disagreed the loudest with my decision making for Piper’s care… was because we tended to reside on total opposite ends of the faith spectrum for this situation.

In the pursuit of my love of photography, I experimented with many different films, lenses, lighting techniques and other kinds of accessories including the use of filters.  And through those years of trial and error, experimentation, good results and not so good… I learned what does and doesn’t work in the various locations, rooms and conditions in which I took pictures… and I am still learning today… especially with the whole new realm of digital photography.

I believe that the same can be said and followed in our daily Christian walk.  Our responses to the different situations of our lives can be positively influenced with the simple change of the FILTER that we screw onto the end of the lens on our mind’s eye! (sort-of-speak!)  Like I’ve said… Life is a constant work in progress!

Are you up to the challenge?

Have a great weekend, and as you do… keep EXPECTING God’s best in your life!