What I Was Actually Looking At

November ninth. The class was two hours, a Tuesday, the same community center room I've used for pottery and yoga, rearranged with long worktables and portable burners and someone else's carefully prepped mise en place. I brought the camera because that was the assignment. I left with maybe four frames of actual food.

The thing nobody told me, or that I wasn't ready to hear when Simone mentioned the class in August, is that the camera doesn't lie about where your attention already is. The instructors were talking about composition and negative space and I was crouched beside a station shooting the light on the rim of a bowl before the dish was finished. The bowl wasn't the point. The sliver of window light caught on glaze before anyone plated anything, that was what I couldn't look away from. Simone, standing two feet away, watched me do this. Did not say anything. Which is her specific way of saying quite a lot.

The look Simone had before I knew what I was doing yet.

At the end of the session I showed her the frames on the LCD screen, scrolling past the rim shot, the shadow where the burner had left a ring on the table lining, one blurry close-up of a wooden spoon resting against the edge of a pan. She named the best one before I landed on it. I already knew which one it was. That's the thing, I already knew. The camera just made it impossible to pretend I didn't. The standing order has been teaching me how to pay attention to food. The camera, it turns out, has been teaching me something slightly different: what I go looking for when nobody's told me what to look at.

End of class. Showing her what I actually shot.

I've been thinking about the photography workshop from a few years back, the one about late-afternoon side light, and how I said then that I preferred the light to the subject. I thought that was a limitation. I'm starting to think it might just be the thing itself.