I took this picture years ago. I have always liked it. I like the mirror reflection of the boat, the water and the mountains in the background. Unfortunately, the haze above the water made the picture muddy and washed out (see the left side of the picture). It flattened the image and it did not pop like it had when I was looking in real life.
The picture languished in my digital photo album and occasionally I would go back and look at it. I tried editing it, but with mixed results. It might be another year before I tried again. Last year, I downloaded a new app that has a specific dehazing filter (see the right side of the picture). It can do wonders to a photograph. I have no idea how it works, but I love the results. Pictures that once were unusable are suddenly alive and vibrant.
I took photography in high school. We had a dark room at our house. I threaded film onto a development reel while standing in the pitch dark. I poured liquids into the canisters and shook them following the steps of an alchemist to change empty strips of negatives into photographic gold. I learned how to frame and crop an image on to photographic paper. I spent hours hunched over trays of chemicals, slowly rocking them back and forth as they revealed the hidden images. I still remember the hushed awe as I watched insights emerge under the safe, red glowing light.
Now, we just point and shoot and the process is done. If we want the pictures printed we send them to a machine that takes care of the rest. It is fast. If the picture is not any good, we just push delete and try again. When I learned photography, each step was costly and time consuming. We took lots less pictures and it was days if not weeks before we saw the result. It was not possible to retake the image. Instead, we had to coax the negative to produce a useful positive. I learned how to dodge (keep part of the image from printing too darkly) and burn (get part of the image to be brighter white) to increase the visual contrast. There were lots of other tricks and sometimes figuring it all out to produce a useful image could take days.
In an instant world, we have lost the art of slow. The ability to wait and reflect and ponder. We have lost the way to see the best in something and then work to improve it. It’s just so much easier to abandon the place, the project or the person. What if we tried to stick together believing that one day it will get better, if not this day? Could it be possible that the way of patience could be more rewarding than the way of discarding? I’m glad I did not delete the image and that finally what I saw years ago I can see again in that picture.
Slow down. Look at the Bible with new eyes asking the Spirit of God to dehaze the image. Be patient with people, believing that the image of God is within them, waiting to see it emerge out of the complexities of this life. Don’t give up when you disagree. Instead, marvel at the contrast of life and treasure other people’s perspectives, knowing that one day God will clarify everything and you will have gotten some of it right and some of it wrong. Come down on the side of grace and possibility.