My personal photo album--computer files and Flickr account, that is--is full of weeds, or anyway, pictures of them. Flowers, too, and dogs and cats and trees and bugs and sunsets and sunrises and formations of migrating geese and a person here and there, but always lots of weeds.

Sounds pretty dull, I know. Who-in-hell takes pictures of WEEDS?

I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective.

A 7^th-grade art class taught me one thing about “perspective,” or maybe one aspect of “perspective,” which, distilled, was basically that any particular thing you’re looking at gets steadily smaller as the distance between it and you increases. The art teacher had us make a pencil mark in the center of a sheet of drawing paper, then make marks equally apart on the left and right edges of the page, then make very light pencil lines from each of those marks down (or up, depending) from the marks on the edges, THEN draw something like a house or a box or anything with straight edges, like a supermodel for instance, within those faint gray pencil lines.

At the end of the exercise, we all could see how perspective “worked.”

Obviously an art teacher or an artist could explain this better than I can.

Three years later I took a photography “mini-course,” a 9-week class introducing me to photography, which gave me a whole different perspective on “perspective.”   In photography, “perspective” had more to do with the angle from which you chose to perceive a subject. So about every 9 weeks or so we would see a different crop of students climbing up on desks, lying prone on the floor, hanging from the transoms above the classroom doors with their cameras pointed down at the ordered or, more often, disordered rows of desks and student occupiers, etc., all looking for a “fresh” perspective on a “photographed 55 billion times” subject.

If it was eye-level to you, you needed to change the position of your eyes, of their height above the floor or ground--get closer to the floor, farther from it, didn’t matter; simply to alter your perspective was what mattered, that might make the image you capture “unique,” or at least different enough from the standard eye-level views to capture the attention of others.

A corollary to that was that you needed to try to seek out and “see from” the perspective of your subjects. If you’re taking a picture of a toddler, get down at eye-level with HIM, try to see the world through HIS eyes, rather than your own: A picture of the top of a toddler’s head is going to make most viewers yawn, at best; an eye-contact level view of a toddler toddling towards you is going to be at least a little more interesting.

What I somehow missed during this perspective lesson was the obvious.

Trying different perspectives can make the images you capture “better,” yes--but it can also change your own perspective, the way you view the world. This is not news, obviously.

I was thinking about all this today when I decided whimsically to go on a low-crawl along the fencerow at the south edge of my yard.

It was an hour or so before I had to go to work, the sun was shining, I was bored reading news and “sorta news” online, and I got to thinking about photography and angles and perspective and “quality of light” and on and on and on. I’ve only been doing photography on a more or less daily basis for maybe seven years now, although I’d toyed intermittently with film since high school (yea, “lo, these many years ago”), but somehow I’ve developed (groan) what a couple of friends call my “signature light.”

That’s not as artistically impressive a term as it may seem. Thing is, my work schedule as well as my personal preferences dictate that I take my camera out mostly in morning--and morning light IS magical.

Today I thought about it, and decided that, if it is true I have a “signature light,” maybe it’s time I tried something else.

Which led me to a low-crawl along the fencerow at approximately high noon (my least favorite light).

Lying on sun-drenched ground in mid February, in northwest Missouri, can be perspective-altering.

And when you actively seek something, generally you find it.

Today I found yet another weed. What made this one different was that it was only about 10 inches tall--this particular variety of weed usually tops out at about 4-5 feet, 5-6 times as tall as this little guy, a sort of “bonsai” among weeds of its ilk, and was inexplicably entranced by it.

I’ve only walked that fencerow with my camera maybe 100-150 times since onset of Autumn, and it’s not a long fencerow, the part that I walk being maybe 120 feet long. Yet until today, when I decided to do a low-crawl, I had never seen this particular brave little stunted weed.

Makes me wonder how much else I’ve missed, standing proudly up at eye level.

(And I still cannot figure out how to make the pic post "upright."  That is irritating.)

Mama please take my monochrome away.

Today was typically monochromatic for this time of year, the winter kind of day that we’ve been blessedly spared for most of this winter season. Coming off four days of semi-debilitating (that is, annoying more than anything else) back pain, despite the black-and-white and shades of gray coloring our world, it was nice to get outside, even nice to point the camera at something besides sunsets, sunrises, dogs, cats--the usual winter things you look for when the world seems otherwise without color.

I haven’t thought in black-and-white, really, in a lot of years, not since Tri-X Pan days, when I worked for a while as a sports photographer for a local newspaper, then as a photojournalist in the army. Once I left school and the army, I never did black-and-white again.

As a photographer I am more photojournalist (or photographic journal-writer) than artist, more interested in the “content” of an image than the image itself. That is not to say that photojournalists cannot produce art, or that photographic artists never produce excellent photojournalism. It really is a difference of approach, how you go about looking at potential “subjects” and even at that tool you carry in your hands and (when you’re lucky) begins to feel like a part of you, an extension not only of your eyes, but of your mind and heart, as well.

This means I take a LOT of pictures, some of them good, most of them ho-hum, some of them godawful. This also means that I have little time for “post processing” and other digital-darkroom manipulation of the images I “capture.” For the most part, that is not a bad thing, I think. My camera does a pretty good job at exposure and all that other stuff all on its own--while I COULD manipulate the image later, there is no real reason, most times, given that it is not the “image” I’m after, but rather more in the life captured IN the image, if any.

Which brings me back to monochromatic today, sort of.

Two of the dogs--Cecil and Nina--having charged off toward the back 40 or down to the river, the other one, Xena, lying comfortably in the snow, and the cats all inside, there wasn’t much at which to point the camera besides the black-and-white landscape, especially since, given the aforementioned back problem, I wasn’t able to get down and crawl around on the ground, etc.

And I began to see in black-and-white again.

It truly is a different way of looking at things. First, you look at shapes and patterns and lines, stuff defined not by color, but by, well, their shapes and patterns and lines. Then you look at contrast--you want black blacks, white whites, and as many of Ansel Adams’s “zones” in between as you can manage. The chisel-plowed field to the north, the chisel-plowed then anhydrous-drilled field to the east, along with trees in both directions, multi-shaded gray sky, all offered opportunity.

I looked and shot and shot and looked until my fingers were nearing frostbite (can’t manipulate a camera with gloves on, and it WAS cold), then came inside, plugged the SD card into the computer, inspected what I had.

“Muddy.” That’s a word we used to use to describe B&W photos that lacked those black blacks and white whites, but were instead only varying shades of gray. In “real” darkrooms back in the day, we could use “burning” and “dodging” and other tricks I’ve forgotten after my 30-something-year separation from trays of developer and rinse and fixer, smells of chemicals and thick black felt hung over doors, working under reddish light, watching images appear slowly, then leap into view on the sheet of paper you’re swishing slowly and methodically in each tray successively.

“Digital darkrooms” aren’t nearly as much fun, but they’re functional, and I admit I was even satisfied with most results. To be able to transform the image I saw on the computer monitor into something more closely resembling what I had seen through my own eyes . . . “Cool” only begins to describe it. And while the final product may be “boring,” I’m happy with it--especially because it reproduced what I remembered.

Trips down memory lane, back into a black-and-white world, can be fun, frozen fingers and all.

That said, I’m sticking with color and with my non-post-processing world. Call me lazy, call me a non-artist. It’s entertaining to visit sometimes, but the black-and-white world is no longer as comfortable for me as it was when I was 18 or 20 or 22. Figure that one out.