Penumbra

     My deadline was five PM. and I still had not taken the perfect picture. I spent my whole morning walking through the city snapping random pictures of the passerby's, looking down at my camera to view them, then deleting with anger and discontent. My anger only depend when I could here my fathers disapproving voice bellow through the wind low and husky " art is not a profession, you should take up politics or something worth doing." My parents never approved of my wanting to paint and be creative. From a very early age I remember when our family would ask me what I wanted to be my mother would answer for me "oh well darling, it obvious she will be a doctor what else would account for that horrid penmanship" Little did she know my handwriting was bad because of the hours I spent holding tight to a pencil as I attempted to recreate the corner of my room on a sheet of paper. I drew pictures all day, some realistic and others more fantastical. When my mother found them she depreciated my work as "a nice little hobby." I never blamed them for their lifelessness, father's father was a physician and his father was a lawyer and as for mother, she comes from a long line of women married to wealthy men.

    I decided to talk a  walk through a park near my school. The walkway started just on the outside of a car intersection and gradually became more and more rural. Walking into the park was like walking through the closet doors to Narnia. I fell into a different world just by walking fifteen feet into a park. The trees swung low and wilt and sad, they looked how the world felt cold and wet and limp. The greens of the trees swallowed up most of the grey sky that begin to darken with rain clouds. As I walked down the man made walkway my shoes clicked clacked against the pavement in harmony with the flutter of leaves against the wind and birds orchestrating the entire symphony. I pulled out my camera to catch a picture of two birds wading in a shallow puddle. I knelt down on one knee into the pavement, aimed my cannon at the two House Sparrows splashing in the pool of water and in a burst of bright yellowy orange the birds flew away and I captured them all at the same time. I stood up and looked to review my photo and to my disappointment the birds had began to fly away way before I snapped my picture. I deleted the photo put my camera back into the case and continued on with my walk.
     It was 3pm and I had 2 hours to digitally capture a piece of time that only I would be able to see first hand. My problem is that my best is never really good enough, even if I was able to imprison the 5am sunrise across the Sahara Desert within my camera there would still be something I could have done better. This inside voice sets me back everytime but this time around it might cost me my grade.
I was extremely confused, this entire fortress of solitude, the massive chocolate barks of the trees in correspondence with the forrest green tree tops, the somber air that the dark clouds produced, the angle at which the pavement dipped steeply down from where I stood and rose back up even higher about a quarter mile down, how could I have not produced the perfect still photo.
    I was approaching the end of the park limp and slow with disappointment. It was about 4pm now and the clouds had began to break and the sun assumed its position at the highest point in the sky. I stood on the outside of the park which let me out on the same side that I came in. I looked out onto the water that park overlooked and I opened my camera to look through some old photos to choose which one I would present instead. While turning my camera on I almost lost grip of it, and in a desperate attempt to prevent my device from plummeting to the ground I snatch it by the neck carrier and juggle it until it rested back in my hands. Once the equipment was back in my hands I was holding it a little tighter than necessary for fear it would fall again, while doing this I accidentally pressed the shutter button and took a picture. I stood there analyzing the photo, it was love at first sight. It was so simple yet it satisfied the objective. A photo of something that can only be seen from my perspective. There I realized that the one things that would work best for this assignment was following me around the entire day. My shadow.