Photo A Day: Close-Up

I bet you don’t know what this is.

It’s nothing particularly unusual. You probably have one in your house. Even if you don’t, I’d bet the majority of you reading this use one on a regular basis. You don’t recognize it yet? I’ll give you a hint: If you don’t have one at your house, you probably use the one at the gym.

Did you guess it yet?

It’s the tread of my treadmill.

It doesn’t look familiar, though, does it? That’s because this is an extremely close-up shot. You don’t usually look at it this closely. The texture looks completely different when you’re an inch away instead of 5 or 6 feet away. And besides, you're only seeing one small part of it. How could you possibly recognize it from a close-up view of one tiny fraction of the whole?

There are a lot of things that look very different when you’re up close than they do from far away. When you get up close, you don’t see the context; you don’t see the whole picture. It’s hard to figure out what something is and how it works when you’re too close. But back away, look at what else is around, see the other components of what you’re looking at, and suddenly everything becomes clear.

Parenting is often like that. You focus in on some issue or problem – maybe it’s your 4-year-old’s picky eating habits, or your 6-year-old’s struggles with writing legibly – and you get in too close to see what else is around. All you can see is that one thing, in your face, crowding out everything else. If you would just back off a little, you’d see that her tastes are growing broader every day, slowly but surely; you’d see that he struggles because he wants to please you and do everything perfectly. It’s all too easy to forget that you and your kids can all benefit from backing off and giving each other a little breathing room. Because sometimes, even love can be just a little too close up.

Close-up.

June 4 Photo: Close-Up

One of the amazing things about human vision is how different something looks from far away than it does close up. Sometimes seeing something close up reveals its imperfections and shortcomings. A fancy ball gown worn by an actress on stage may look glamorous and beautifully made to the audience, but seen up close it is actually threadbare and many times patched and mended. Distance melts away the imperfections that being close up reveals.

But in other cases, seeing something close up reveals finer details that make an object more impressive or more interesting. For example, a shirt that looks purple from far away, when seen close up, may actually be a fine plaid of red and blue. Seen even closer, the plaid pattern resolves itself into dozens of individual fibers woven together in an even more intricate pattern. An ordinary insect like a ladybug or a dragonfly is pretty but simple when seen at a distance. But peep through a magnifying glass and it becomes a marvel of intricate and detailed engineering, with multiply-hinged legs, unbelievably delicate feathery antennae, and impossibly complicated veined wings.

And some things are beautiful both from far away and close up, just in different ways. Looking into my backyard on this dreary, rainy day, I am struck by the cheery bright gold of my lilies, and by the graceful curves of their petals. And as I brave the rain to look at them more closely through my camera lens, I am struck by the softness of those petals and the contrast of the fuzzy stamens with their coating of sticky pollen, the intricate pattern of dark spots radiating from deep within the blossom, and the shining raindrops on the leaves.

There is far-away beauty and there is close-up beauty in almost everything!