The world around us is filled with beauty.  There is some way to look at anything around you and see beauty in it.  Take, for example, the picture above… it’s a photograph of an ordinary tree with a few small flowers around its base.  You could easily pass by and not even notice it consciously… it is very ordinary.  Looked at from the right angle, though, it can produce a very interesting picture.

Life is like that… you can find beauty in the most ordinary of places.  There is, of course, the beauty of a truly happy smile… no matter whose face it is on.  There is also the passing beauty that arises when one object is perfectly juxtaposed over another, like a palm tree silhouetted against a sunset sky.

Seeing these things, the extraodinary beauty in the common sight, is what it means to have the eyes of a photographer.  You capture the moment, the precise frame, and store it, whether it’s on film, a memory card, or just in your mind.

You can have the eyes of a photographer when it comes to the non-visual parts of life, too.  You can find the beauty in a baby’s laughter, a mischievious glint in a young boy’s eyes, or the way your beloved touches you softly, looking into your eyes.  These are beautiful moments that you can capture, just like a photographer captures a wondrous sight.

You can record them on the film of your mind, to review later, when circumstances warrant.  You can bring them out to share with others, talking about the memories you have captured until the wee hours of the morning.  You can look at them in the quiet of your own mind when you are sad, to remind you of the beauty of life (though sadness can be beautiful, too).  Or you can simply have a quiet moment with your happy memories, reliving some of the best moments.

You don’t have to capture every nuance of the scene in sharp detail… sometimes blurring background elements is part of the beauty of the whole.  Look at the flower in the picture above, for instance… it is out of focus, blurred, but if it weren’t, it would change the whole picture.  It is often more useful to keep the important elements in sharp focus while allowing the rest to blur… it brings even more emphasis to the parts that are in focus, that you want to show.

So… where can you find beauty in the ordinary?  Find something today, whether it’s a picture, a sound, or a memory.  And if you like, you can share it with me… you can find my email by clicking my name at the top of this article.