I know that I keep going back and talking about my trip to Africa, but that is because it awakened something in me as a photographer. When we are at home surrounded by our lives, we often don’t take time to smell the flowers, let alone photograph them. In Africa, I didn’t face the demands that I face in my everyday life, so I was able to spend some time just taking pictures because I wanted to. Granted, I did have to take a lot of pictures of the work that Catholic Relief Services is doing over there as well, but even that was different from taking photos of yet another birthday party or soccer game.
Two of my favorite photos were taken after a rain shower on our Sunday morning in Uganda. (Please click on the thumbnails to view larger versions of the photographs, especially the flower since you really can’t see the details in the thumbnail.)
You wouldn’t think that a photo of a snail would be someone’s favorites, but I just love the colors and that I had time to appreciate them.
My taking time to photograph the flowers paid off in an unexpected way as well. About a month or so ago, one of the editors at my work came by and saw a photo that I had in my cube. She said that she had seen it before. Apparently our fundraising folks had decided to use it on a notecard. I knew that we periodically sent out packs of notecards to our donors, so I didn’t think too much about it. I figured it would be one of 5 different cards that donors got. I later found out that wasn’t the case. Instead, they created a notecard – using my photo – that was printed up with a letter from the president of CRS in it and sent out to donors. I know it will probably wind up in people’s trash cans, but it still feels good to know that of all of the choices that they had, they chose to use my photo.
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