What Pictures Miss

If you get on the internet and google beautiful scenery you will find a lot of very nice pictures of beautiful landscapes all over the world. I really enjoy pictures of nature and have a few hung up in my windowless cube at work. However, there is something missing.

In high school and through college I did a lot of hiking and backpacking all over the country. I saw firsthand the subjects of a lot of the pictures you see in the google search, and I have to say, the most perfectly composed picture just misses it. There is a depth and wholeness that is lost when a scene is represented in a picture.

I don't know what the difference is exactly. Even sitting on my back porch at the little patch of woods, that I can see the back of a shopping center through, carries something that the best nature photographer is not able to reproduce.

Being outside, feeling the sun and wind, hearing the breeze, seeing the beauties of things big and small, far a near, carries a fullness that nurtures my soul like nothing else. Sometimes on my way home from work I'll stop by the shore and watch the waves in the bay. Even if it's chilly I'll roll my window down to hear the water and birds and to smell the air.

The world is too big and too beautiful to always sit inside looking at poor reproductions of the glorious natural beauty that is out there.