pamelagmusings

Musings

Pam's Musings

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

A long time ago or once upon a time, stifled by the desire to get everything right on paper, rendered immobile by my inner and nasty critic, I was encouraged to read Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I have read it numerous times and often wish I could commit it to memory.  Ah, the perfection that comes from the memorized verse.  Lamott strikes out at the need and desire for perfection.  Instead, she pushes me to embrace the messiness of writing, to muse.  She tells me to let go and not worry about destination or the big picture.  She set before me the creed by which my musings are written, by which my inner wild woman craves to live:  “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.”  When I muse, and this is a necessary part of my writing process, I don’t look.  I just write.  I hope you enjoy these musings.  I hope you muse as well.  

Through a Lens Brightly, January & February 2026

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I was a mere child when I wandered through the house that we were leaving, taking pictures, unbeknownst to my mother, with her Brownie camera. It was a pretty house on a country road. My sister and I pretended it was our magic house. I didn’t understand why we were going someplace new to live. I had only been told that Daddy had received his military Orders to report to a place called Florida.

A huge truck came to take all of our belongings. In a frenzy, I ran from room to room, pressing the button on the camera. I remember that I asked my sister to take a picture of me standing against the dark green walls of our empty living room. She swears they were white.

I must have thought that the little Brownie could take everything with it, every memory, every detail, all that the senses evoked, all that had been experienced. Perhaps it might have, had those pictures been someday processed. But sadly, the camera was empty of film.

When I left for college, I carried in my suitcase the gift of a camera, my very own Brownie. In mere ownership, I considered myself an expert. Empty. Point. Click. Load. Repeat.

I took hundreds of pictures, capturing on Friday and Saturday nights the moments with my beloved college girlfriends.  They huddled into awkward group shots and posed most dramatically. I knew nothing of technique. When the pictures came back from the drug store, the blurs didn’t matter to me, nor did I care that heads or arms had been cut off, or that my friends were too close or too far. I bought photo albums and filled them full by my senior year. Years later, the glue that held the photos to their pages in my photo album had dried up. As the photos fluttered to the floor, I would only vaguely remember how the stories connected and why. My wild clicks of that camera had yielded very little of the essence of my real time with my friends.

The desire to capture moments and images through a lens remained with me, however. Now a wife and mother, I treasured the time my husband took to teach me to use his dad’s single lens reflex camera. When it wore out, I wrapped it in an old t-shirt and buried it on a closet shelf. I wore out a second camera kneeling to catch the tiniest of flowers, lying supine to catch a drifting cloud, or crouched to click pictures of my sons at play. As we hiked the mountains and prairies, I could not refrain from searching constantly for life’s offered pictures. I learned that the perfect picture was one of sheer luck, possibly unattainable, but the realization didn’t deter me from that frequent click.

Sheer luck did visit once. My two-year-old had leaned on a low window ledge in our study to stare out the window at antelope grazing in our yard. I tiptoed to my camera, sneaked into the study and started snapping pictures wildly, twisting and turning in silence to achieve all angles. I wanted to record that moment more than anything in the world and didn’t care what it took to do it. I was not timid with the camera. I was wild. I submitted the picture my husband chose from the stack. We submitted it to a Wyoming photo contest. Sheer luck and wildness won a ribbon.

I had been the past few years without a camera. One beautiful late Spring day in the mountains, I started jabbering excitedly to my husband about the wide expanse of marsh marigolds. As I talked, I had shaped a camera with my fingers. My husband listened and watched and then shared that he was in the midst of researching for a camera. For me! It’s just a little guy, a Cannon EOS, and I am somewhat baffled by all the new digital features. I am blessed, however, with sons who are comfortable and able with all things digital. My youngest son gently, methodically, patiently, and with encouragement recently showed me how to load my photos—and oh, there were many—to my computer.

I was then all too eager—with a bit too heavy a dose of confidence—to see the finished products on the computer, but I didn’t yet know how to retrieve them on the computer. My oldest son, an amazing newspaper sports photographer, stepped in.

He was eager to see the “thousands” of pictures I had snapped of scenes in the nearby hills and of our trip to Yellowstone. As we moved from photo to photo, I noticed, and he agreed, that most of the pictures lacked something. In a gentle and supportive way, he helped me to see what was lacking, what could have been done differently, what visual tools and concepts I had to work with. He never once suggested that I lacked ability. In fact, nearly every suggestion began with “for the next time.” I was a bit deflated, but I knew there would be many “next times”.

Using my pictures as teaching tools, he talked about depth and point of interest. He excitedly pointed out what was working in a photograph, explaining that I was in fact finding Nature’s pictures.

He showed me how to crop a photo to find the focal point. He moved his finger to illustrate the reader’s eye and the created line of interest. He shared that for every thousand pictures taken, perhaps only one, with a bit of cropping, is a winner.

He taught me that night that a photograph is not just to record a memory but to tell a story. I realized that a photograph is not unlike a narrative essay. The subject is revealed as a centered object. Conflict, the essence of thought and questioning, is created by Nature’s mere being and its many edgy contrasts. What results is an invitation to discover a story of complexity. It is up to the photographer to turn that story toward the observer.

According to the famous wildlife photographer, Derek Joubert, “The best photographs end with a question mark.” To seek those question marks, I sling my camera case over my shoulder and head out into the world.

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