John Rosenthal in The Hedgehog Review:
I don’t carry a camera in my hometown of Chapel Hill, and even though my cellphone contains a camera, I use it only for snapshots. Naturally, there were moments when I wished I had a camera with me. Once, while walking in my neighborhood at twilight, I felt a strange rush of energy in the air, and, suddenly, no more than twenty feet away, a majestically antlered whitetail buck soared over a garden fence and hurtled down the dimming street. Yet even as it was happening—this unexpectedly preternatural moment—I tried to imagine it as a photograph. That’s how we’ve been taught to think. “Oh, I wish I’d had a camera!” But that presumes I would have been prepared to capture the moment—instead of being startled by it. Yet being startled by beauty is a uniquely, and all too rare, human gift. The photograph comes later, when I journey back from astonishment and begin to fiddle with my camera.
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