I started this post 21 days ago – 8/31 at 7:16 AM… amazing how time is still flying, even though the wedding has come and gone.
Occasionally there are moments in my life where everything else seems to fade, to quiet-down, and one subject sticks out, defined very clearly, and overtake everything in that moment. And that moment just sloooooows down time. It’s rather hard to describe, but these moments stick in my head, and they seem so surreal to me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted about the tree, the rain, and the Doors in Kentucky… if not, I will sometime. I’ll have to dig around and see if it’s anywhere in the diary.
The thing about these moments – they would make wonderful pictures, but bringing the camera into the situation would break the mood and the experience that’s happening. People often assume that the camera goes everywhere with me, that I can’t wait to travel and take pictures. While it’s true that when we go on the amazing honeymoon my husband has planned I will have the camera in tow, and enjoy that, it’s not normally my preferred method of photographing anything. It disrupts my moments. I’d rather go back, re-create the moment, on another day, after the experience.
The point I’m getting to… During the wedding week there are a couple of these surreal moments, where time slowed and a subject came into clear focus. The first was meeting Raju’s cousin Geeta. I believe in my list I described her as smoldering… fiery, full of life… those things all popped into my head during this one instant — blink of a second really. I was thinking someone else caught this side profile view that I had of her at that moment, but I’ve yet to find the picture. Maybe the smoldering Geeta just burned her image into my memory and that’s my picture.
The other slow, surreal moment was when I grabbed a bit of cool air, drifted away from the party. I was sitting on the ledge, talking to another of Raju’s cousins (he has almost as many as a Southerner, maybe more). Diane had walked away, leaving only Shankar standing below. Again, time slowed and in one instant, a lull in our conversation, I can remember the cool air, the sky above, and the look on Shankar’s face, standing below. No snap judgments this time, just a singular moment in time that is as clear in my head as if I’d taken a snapshot.
