Photons

While wandering through the woods and wetlands and lake shores, I often think about how the other creatures would view what I am witnessing. When a beautiful moment in nature makes us, the humans, merge into it, how does it appear to the birds, squirrels, serpents, insects, and their likes. Even if our science would understand the neurochemistry of their brain during those moments, we may never know the experiential parts of it. These thoughts often lead me to anthropomorphize their perspectives by orienting the camera in angles that are close to their viewpoints. Sometimes, the perspective in an old footage can also appear to be anthropomorphized, when looked through the filter of those thoughts. This page captures a few instances of such perspectives.

When the snowflakes give in to Earth’s gravity and start covering its surface with their soft unique ice crystals, the planet transitions into a monochromatic wonderland. Immersed into a meditative silence created by snowflakes soaking up the rustling sound of lonely winter leaves, and the creaking noise of the yearning branches of hibernating trees. Nature renders an image of its past ice ages, and what is to come for the Universe after its inevitable heat death in a distant future. It reminds, water exists only as ice everywhere in the Universe except on this precious moist rock. The landscape in monochrome magically blends one’s senses of impermanence and eternity together into the present moment of one’s existence.

The word opacare in Latin means dusk. That makes Opacarophilia the addiction to sunset. The addiction started for me since when I was a child. I remember spending many late afternoons staring at our setting orange-yellow star over a concrete laden horizon from the roof of my childhood home in Kolkata. It was not until recently that I learnt the word Opacarophilia, and started noticing it in me. Especially while looking at the sun setting over mighty Lake Michigan through various camera lenses on and above ground. Every sunset is unique in its colors, and the emotions it evokes before, during, and after the sun goes below the horizon. As my addiction deepens, a sunset appears less and less about an end. Rather, it projects a cortical bonanza of experiential windfall in our fleeting existence in the midst of eternity. I learnt to see a sunset also as a moment of renewal just about 8000 miles east on the planet. This page contains a few sunset footages out of countless that I was able to record over the years.

He saw the rhythms and patterns in all beings and inanimate objects as parts of a connected web of infinity. He promised the comfort of permanence through his odes of impermanence in nature, in us, and in the infinity of this universe. Much of his seemingly endless amount of poetry is about finding limitlessness in the ephemeral rhythms and patterns we experience everyday. His work instruments a unique way of mindfully observing existence, moment by moment, and identifying it as part of a calm and comforting eternity. This page contains a few of Gurudeb Rabindra Nath Tagore’s songs. The audio is overlaid with some of my images and footages that captured emotions evoked in me while listening to those songs.

There come moments when physical constraints of existence are dissolved by cortical simulations of reality, we call imagination and desire. Like the desire to fly over a swan river. The shot on this page was an unexpected gift during a late-winter hike by the river Huron.

Contemplating astronomical objects and their dimensions is known to be corrosive to one's self-perceived importance in a cosmic context. A season of pandemic-triggered lockdown which prevented going out in the nature led me to explore the world of imaging the nature above. Why image an astronomical object? The look of it has not changed over millennia, already imaged millions of times from this planet and from space, and often with quality that an amateur astronomer can only dream of. It is, I found, not the image itself, but the awe it inspires by the feeling of being able to look into millions of years back in time, and distances that our brain had not evolved to be able to fully comprehend. I am learning to fall in love with the intoxication of the sense of being part of something whose vastness can let one's ego dissolve into insignificance! No one expressed it better than Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot. Astro-imaging is an enduring test of one's patience and perseverance that demands countless nights under the stars, with crickets, mice, deers, badgers and many other living parts of the Universe.

An 8000 mile wide rock is hurtling through space at 19 miles per second. The rock endured over 4 billion years of geo-chemical unthinkable, and accidentally produced our experiential abstractions like the fragrance of a Jasmine, pain of losing a sister, or the exhilaration of touching a newborn. We, the rock-dwellers, are indescribably fortunate to be able to experience that bio-chemical process, we call life, on this moist rock! Images on this page are about that rock we call home.

Judgments and searching for patterns in sensory experiences are how human mind evolved. Yet, mindfulness in many contemplative traditions values raw sensory experience without judgments and classifications, which are inherently subjective and arguably distracting! Images on this page are not categorized and left without captions for promoting raw visual experience.

Over four billion years, our rock's geology transformed its gift from the comets into limitless oceans with waves of surreal beauty. Seeing a wave's ephemerality and its vigor to embrace everything in its way always reminds me of uninhibited expressions of intense human emotions. Yet, those waves are oblivious to our presence and existed every moment since water was gifted to the planet. The videos in this page were aerially shot along the Pacific coasts of the United States.

All major languages relied on our moon as a metaphor to create odes of dream, love, and softness. Its liquid yellow-whiteness covers oceans and mountains while mellowing human emotions into expressions. The cycles and phases of this rock had provided cultural references and influences for human societies throughout history. Its influences can be found in language, calendar systems, art, and mythology. Moon also majorly influences our climate by stabilizing Earth’s axial tilt, which is responsible for the seasons. Without moon, climatic extremes caused by seasonal irregularities may have prevented life from evolving on this planet. From a distance of quarter of a million miles, moon also contributes to our oceans’ tidal cycle, which transports heat around different parts of world’s oceans and impacts evolution and speciation of life. The satellite is receding from us about 1.5 inches every year, making the days and nights increasingly longer by slowing down Earth’s spin. This page contains a few images of our Dreamers Rock!