I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever talked about this here before or not, but I felt it made sense to bring it up today after getting an email from a friend of mine about how her boyfriend is struggling a bit. So today I will share with you the Camera Experiment. And no, it’s not a legitimate experiment in the peer-reviewed, proper adherence to scientific method sense, but it worked for me. Oh, sweet anecdotal evidence!

There was a time when I was having real problems seeing any good in the world. I would read the paper and see our latest act of barbarism. I would watch the news and swim through that media sea of negativity. I would look around at the people I worked with and see their mistakes, their failings, and their prejudices. I began to see just how ugly the world could be.

Fortunately for me, I’m not a very emotional person, so when I become emotional, particularly negatively emotional, I examine it. I’m smart enough to know that these are usually just biochemical issues working inside me, and while I was in no way in need of a medical intervention to right the problem, it helped me to come up with an understanding of the problem. The chemicals inside me were waiting to find, maybe even seeking out the negative in the world. The most logical solution I could come up with was to beat them to the punch and actively seek out beautiful things.

So I bought myself a cheap camera.

I promised myself that every day I had to find one thing that was beautiful enough to photograph. It didn’t matter if it was a scenic vista, a pretty girl, a neat configuration of bugs, the way light passed through barren branches… All that mattered was that I found it beautiful.

I expected to go through a roll of film in a little less than a month. Assuming 24 exposures on a roll, that made sense. But I went through 22 rolls of film in a month. As soon as I began to look for beautiful things, I began to see them. They’re everywhere. And it wasn’t long before my negative thoughts faded into the background again.

Now tragically, I’m as good at photography as I am at neurosurgery, and most of the pictures were terrible, but it didn’t dissuade me. I wasn’t doing it to get pretty pictures, I was doing it to see pretty things. What photos exist (if any)¬†now live with my ex-wife in some box somewhere, and I doubt I’d even recognize them anymore. One of these days I’ll buy myself a digital camera and renew the experiment, but for now I simply pass on the experiment in hopes that it will help someone else.

Jim