Panorama
December 12, 2024
Being able to travel is a gift. Near or far, going somewhere you’ve never been is such a treat. You’re out of your routine. Your bed is different. The food is different. Everything you’re seeing, smelling, thinking and feeling is different. It rewires your brain. You form new associations and new ways of looking at things, the world, your home, yourself. It’s a gift.
I turned 50 this year. This trip to Scotland was a literal gift as well as a figurative one. It was the trip of all trips. There was so much newness for all of my senses that my brain had a hard time keeping up. There were times that I just needed to sit, to be quiet. I needed to process a lot of things after the fact because I couldn’t do it in real time. Even as I sit here writing this three months later, I can see that I’m still processing everything I took in.
Part of processing a trip after you get some distance is going through the photographs. In the moment, I was snapping my camera and my phone at every opportunity. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever be in Scotland again and I wanted to take as much of it home with me as I could. There are approximately 1000 photos left after editing out the garbage and I still don’t think I took enough. Patterns started to emerge as I looked through the images. I took more photos of my feet than I thought I did. Matt took a lot of photos of me taking photos. There are lots of selfies of Matt and I together. There are photos of food. Photos of light fixtures (I have a thing for light fixtures). But I think the thing that stands out above everything else is that Scotland is the home of the panoramic photo. There is so much horizontal beauty to be seen, not that there isn’t vertical beauty too, but the horizontal just kept taking over and I collected more panoramic shots on this trip than all of my other panoramic photos combined.
Scotland, you are a beautiful wonder.