There's something to be said about shooting first and asking questions later.
But be prepared to have the gears and pinions of your heart -- well-oiled or rusty and corroded these may be --- put out in plain sight.
Photographs, esp. those that race ahead of our ability to understand them, hold up a mirror to what's inside minus the distort of our equivocations and procrastinations with words.
Sometimes the autobiographical view can be as disconcerting as seeing one's intestines digest dinner. And the universe tends to add an extra punctuation or two just to underscore the message.
Like what happened with the photo on the right, one of the few personal ones I took amongst a few dozen formal documentaries of churches during a recent trip to Pangasinan.
I have to admit to a certain subversive urge when I saw the minuscule saint amongst a forest of dark twisted metals bathed by the less-than-angelic mood lighting. That its head was visually negated by a metal bar was less conscious heresy than technical shoddiness on my part. And --- with another guilty dig at my pagan forehead ---, I gotta confess it didn't at all hurt the effect I was after. The whole setup also stood out from the deep gloom of a church's underside even in late morning.
When I chopped some of the forest, post-exposure, to focus on just couple of trees, my little heresy was thrown back at me twice amplified when I saw the true punctum/puncta of this image. Did I hear someone say that subliminal messaging is no longer the exclusive turf of liquor and automobile commercials? Or is my imagination just working overtime from days of looking for anthropomorphic images in the clouds?
