Step In, Stand Back

Stand waaaay back.

One of the cooler capabilities of my current camera phone is its wide-angle view. I’d been able to zoom-in for a long while–The better to see you with, my dear, at least until it’s just the fuzzier to see you–but the zoom-out or slightly wide-angle view is an ongoing revelation.

Without thinking deeply about it, I have always assumed that my camera, phone or otherwise, records what I see. And so it can, but it’s not a given. My camera phone, at least, approximates my eye’s field of view with a 2x zoom-in. The 1x or supposedly standard view pushes everything a bit further out than I experience it. It’s like I’m standing a little bit behind where I actually am. That can be a good result, offering more context, or a less-than-good result, losing the subject in a mess of context. As a result, as it were, I’m usually zooming in, often to the limits of whatever optical zoom the camera offers without losing photo quality.

But the stand-waaaay-back feature–shown on my phone as .5, a label that fits better on the screen–is the one I like to play with when I’m shooting landscapes. It can distort the view a bit (as it does here, with the phone tilted up), but it often captures the feel of a scene better than the literal transcription of it. The sheer scale of the world, even my small corner of it, is hard to grasp, but sometimes it smacks me in the face. As does its beauty, at any scale.

Are we the only living creatures who can indulge various optical views of a scene in front of us, from the close-up of the palm tree’s bark to its place, more or less, under the heavens? I expect so. We might, at least, take the time to delight in it.

Are we the only living creatures who can indulge various figurative views of real-world problems in front of us, from the tough, tough, tough trade-offs of strategy to the picky, picky, picky complexities of execution? I expect so. We might, at least, take the time to be thankful when political systems cope with both, even halfway well.