THE EYE WITHIN
Photography by Susan Rangitsch
I am drawn to the mystery, the non-ordinary world —
What cannot be seen by the naked eye, but the essence, and what lies below the surface.
I look to capture an image that has captured me. That certain smile, that certain look, the glance of light on ice, that still second of captured beauty that causes one to exhale.
Photography to me is the ability to focus and look into the nature of things. A photograph is only a photograph until it reveals something more, when it causes you to wonder, subject that I can see into, whether the eyes of toothless old women, or the eyes of the eagle.
ICE
On occasion, I have been found lying out on the ice, belly down with my face, and the camera, inches away from the flow of a frigid creek.
It’s a sunlight winter day, the temperature zero or below, and I’m out there, oblivious to their question, “Are you alright?”
I am focused on a small blade of ice, light and the movement of water. I am inside an unseen world of spectacular beauty. I dare not move or I’ll loose it all and that one fraction of an image will never come again as the ice changes form and melts into the flow.
EAGLES
The Bald Eagles of the Kenai Peninsula, scavenging for salmon along the shoreline. How to capture the look of an eagle, without a high-powered zoom?
My answer to the dilemma of lens and distance was to become one with the posts the eagles were perched on, which I was able to do, without becoming their perch; a rare privilege given to me by these great birds.