Chance Glances

The Atlantic View, 2010

When you get in the habit of looking for pictures, I don’t think your eyes ever relax. They’re always on the lookout. Maybe this sounds like a lot of unnecessary mental work to you. But I consider it a gift. And if you’re similarly “gifted,” you know exactly how I feel.

A friend of mine (a poet who always has a pen and index card in his pocket for just such occasions) used to refer to this ability of the brain to keep working on things after you’ve consciously put them aside as the “subconscious hit list.”

I wasn’t thinking about pictures the afternoon my wife and I joined here sister and brother-in-law for lunch at The Atlantic restaurant in Edgartown. I don’t remember what it was we’d been doing before lunchtime. But I do remember that whatever it was we were all in need of a few moments of relaxation and liquid therapy.

Maybe the relaxation’s the key. I don’t know. Once I stepped into the restaurant my eyes started seeing things that had me drawing the camera up to my eyes again and again.

The first thing I saw was the view shown above. The scene is the Edgartown harbor as seen through the plastic screen surrounding the outside deck of the restaurant. The plastic gave the view the kind of impressionistic feel I often like. (Click again on the image above and it will enlarge so that you’ll see what I mean.)

It was still chilly outside, so we asked to move indoors. The first thing I saw inside was this view, a good example of the “portal perspectives” I enjoy so much.

From The Atlantic, 2010

When we were finally seated and began to unwind, I noticed a planter just outside the window. My first shot of it, below, was purely information, not anything I’d want to keep.

From The Atlantic, 2010

The last shot, though, was the one I like most because it has this scene of the two flowers poking their faces up at the window as if to look in and see what we were having for lunch.

Chance Glances, 2010