I do that. I mean I keep coming back to the same place, the same thing, and taking the same picture. or more likely pictures. Just look at this summer's garden shots. Daylilies, most of them, though I got here when the dutch and bearded iris were still blooming, along with columbine and a few others, and stayed through coneflowers, liatris, white Alaska daisies, brown-eyed Susans, balloon flowers, astilbe, and hostas. If we count the yard blossoms, we can add roses, honeysuckle bushes, high bush cranberries, milkweed and asclepias. I've shot most of them before, except for newly purchased varieties or newly planted ones from last fall. When I get a particular bloom, and a new one opens the next day in a slightly different spot or in different lighting or with different companions, I'm there taking more shots.
The thing is, it's never the same picture. The slightly hot pink are still slightly hot pink ones, the small purples are same as the day before, except they aren't. Not quite. And I don't always shoot the same quality. Backgrounds vary, sun/shade varies, the direction they face varies, how open the petals are varies, and even something in the same color I shot yesterday strikes me more compellingly today. All that is just the garden flowers in just one garden.
Try the cherry trees. First there are oodles of green cherries. Then reddish. Then red, fat, and juicy. Then fewer of the red, fat and juicy, or a different hour of the day, or the magic of watching the birds go after them and teach their fledglings to do the same propels me to shoot more even without any birds. There might be blue sky or green treetops or white clouds behind the branches, and those are never the same either. I'm no longer here when they bloom, nor when their fall colors take over, nor when bare branches wear their various winter decorations, be it frost, sticky snow, or ice.
When I travel, I shoot the same mountains, or what appear to be. There are differences, as even they age, timeless though they seem. I study a stream as the water moves, and from as many angles as I safely can. I see how it changes on a return trip with light from a different angle, or how this year's water level reveals what last year's hid. Does the tree canopy enclose it more or has a storm broken openings for light to shine through?
I love the fog. On a good morning, if I can I cancel plans, grab the camera, and roam looking for what it reveals when it hides other things. There's a favorite river close by with a park I can roam and a high bridge with a safe place to walk on each side. Are the sandbars larger and supporting greenery or have spring floods washed them away? Who's tied up a boat along the bank, or is casting from their boat downstream? Is a canoeist approaching? Two dozen? I'll keep returning here for the shot that tells my heart what it found there, or at least that's the hope since my heart has loved this spot for decades.
Occasionally I'll go through my photos and heartlessly cull former treasures. There'll be cleaner, sharper focus, a more perfect bloom, a day with more meaning, that sudden appearance of some wild creature not visible previously. I'll decide those three dozen shots are actually the same one, all mediocre, but I may keep one until the better one comes along. If a trip is not likely to be repeated, more are kept, so I don't forget a moment past the point of recovering it with another look at the photo.
But I never have to do more than step outside for one of my perennial favorites, the driveway here in MN. There are shots looking both out and in. The ones looking in capture the history of the house, from a skeleton being built into a home, to the baby trees which grow and stretch from 3 feet to 60, even the different cars in the driveway.
The cars fascinate me for what their windows catch. It might be a reflected sunrise, patterns of winter frost, something in the dirt or the leaves caught under the wiper blades. I've tried to catch doggie noses pushing out but they never misbehave just the right way at the right moment.
The best driveway shots are taken when the cars aren't there. Or at least aren't in the shot. One sunrise caught a long, heavy icicle standing in a snowbank which happened to be in the right spot when it dropped off the roof, and large enough to support it vertically for days after. The sun was rising red and snow shadows from the icicle were dark blue while the sun gleamed through the ice.
We have two birch clumps along the driveway, uprooting meandering trails in the asphalt. Halfway to the street are the white paper birches, their trunks with lichens a favorite backdrop for the flowers which happen to be growing near them. Out at the property line are the massively overgrown river birch, leaf laden branches pulled down low enough to brush the cars as they go through. Pruning off branches ever higher on their trunks each year never does more than mitigate the issue for the end of the season while the trees ready the next level of branches to make their attacks next midsummer. Looking out through them hides much of the neighborhood from view. Looking in from them, angled perfectly, frames the outlines of the house or more narrowly, isolates pieces of the garden. Looking outward in a good fog turns those branches into the end of your world. Morning sun turns those branches into silhouettes. Autumn flecks the sky with gold. Moonlight after an ice storm is unearthly.
Same shot? Always. Never.
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