Depth of Field

"Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have! Matthew 6:22-23 (The Message)

With most point-and-shoot cameras you lose the ability to play with the lens separately, watch how it works, and in turn understand how you can make the majority of the photo crisp, or with the twist of the dial, just a shallow portion of the image.

"The bigger the number the smaller the hole.
The smaller the number the bigger the hole!"

I used to have to say that in sing-song voice to help remember the rule as a nursery rhyme. There's a mathematical formula but the simple song works best for me. The rule means that if you open the lens, you are likely to have an f-stop close to 4, and your image will have a selected area that is crisp and focused, while the remainder of the image should be soft and blurry. Maybe you want to have a portrait where the face is the focal point, but the background grows blurry making your eye concentrate on that which is clearest, the face. But if you have just turned around the bend of the road and the Grand Tetons have suddenly burst onto the canvas, you want to keep it all in focus: the horses in the meadow, the tree-line in the distance, and the powerful rock formations of the mountain peaks. Then you would make sure the lens was shut down to 36 so that you could ensure the largest depth of field. Most us shoot in program or automatic, and you may accidently get the effect you wanted, but it's so much easier to leave the math and the thinking to the camera. Sometimes the moment can be lost if you rely on your making your own adjusments, but even worse the verse from Matthew implies to me, that you have been looking through the lens with the lens cap still on the end! Then you don't get to see anything! No light can get through!

My prayer for the congregation?

Dear God, We have selected focus which allows us to see clearly that which is close to us, our needs, our will, our family, our town, our world. It can serve a purpose as we attend to details or narrow the scope of a larger issue, chipping away at that which we have access. But sometimes we fail to see the whole picture; our needs side-by-side with the needs of those far from us, the same necessities as our enemies, the same essential air as all things living, the same gravitational pull of all things on earth. As we continue to widen our gaze of our world, let us pull back our vision and resolve even further so that we can include our will within Your will. Above all we ask that we are able to abandon our actions that leave us in darkness and live in light. Amen.