Journey to Understanding

My office falls silent. The air is thin, a bit harder to breathe. The only light I can see comes from the computer monitor in front of me.  Unsure how I ended up in an old Lightroom catalog, but there he sits on my screen. Dad.  I work each slider in the develop module nothing is bringing the photograph to life. Something is wrong; it does not feel right. A pile of work and deadlines sits on my desk, but I can not pull away from this image.

You know when someone has passed away you wish you could have had that one last special day with them? I had that gift with Dad. I was given two weeks jammed packed with giggles, long car rides, exploring new places, and sharing our passion for photography. We did not know those were our last days together, but we lived them to the fullest.   When I think of him, it is not childhood memories; it is those two weeks. 

Dad did not have the energy he did the year before. I would often find him sitting surrounded by vegetation. Sometimes working his macro skills other times lost in deep thought. This day I photographed him seated in the prairie grass in Wind Cave National Park. Above average amounts of rainfall made hills and prairies greener that June instead of the typical dried brown grass, making our excursions all the more memorable. 

Frustrations with the inability to convey my emotions in the image pulled me out of my trip down memory lane.  I open a different photography program, Topaz, for one of my favorite black and white conversions. Quickly I ruled out black and white. My most active memories of that summer involved color.  At that moment I understand what is wrong with the photograph. It is a picture, light captured on a sensor recording him at that moment in time.  That is what he was to me then, not now.  Now, Dad is an abstract, always with me but never seen.  He is the memory I invite to ride in the passenger seat everytime I hit the road. Dad is who I am talking to in the field when people think I am talking to myself. Dad has moved beyond the picture. Therefore I push the photograph into graphic art using a painterly post process. This post most likely will be one of the very few if not the only time I will publicly show a no-long-a-photograph-graphic-art-because-I-can't-paint image, but it feels right.