“My heart is crying, but my eyes are dry”. I borrowed this opening line (rather shamelessly) with apologies to Walter Trout, from the song, All out of tears. Though the song is about a mother losing her son, the syllogism of those two lines was staring in my face. Like many of us, if not all of us, I do tend to have those “blues” days or melancholic days. These lows are not necessarily triggered by any major events. As the saying goes it is one of those days.
You feel the pain and hurt but it is not something that gets you sympathy, let alone empathy for your situation. The reasons could be myriad, you miss a loved one, or frustrated perhaps at work, or you are upset because you found a scratch on your car door. So it may very well be my heart is crying, but my eyes are dry for all to see. These “blues” are yours alone since in a realistic and pragmatic sense, you are being irrational, unreasonable, and may even be childish. But these are the pebbles in your shoes that can potentially stop you from climbing that mountain ahead.
The frequency of these bouts, sometimes far and few in-between, other times more often made me to introspect and identify the root cause. I know the only remedy that worked for me is to boot strap every single time. I had no other choice. I cannot afford to have these “blues” days too often as I found out they do/did impact my blood sugar levels and as a diabetic, that is not a good thing.
This search for the underlying cause(s) for my “blues” days did not lead me anywhere for a long time. There are no “real” world reasons for me to feel sorry for myself, life being good and very satisfying, loving and doting family, wonderful friends who blur the difference family and friends and some even became more family than kinfolk, relatively stable financial situation, and more importantly health. So from every measure of what a happy life should constitute, I have checked almost all the boxes. The “blues” days have become my existential angst. The struggle became my own.
One of the most enjoyable personal activities for me is post processing my images. Looking at them, cringing at the inept composition, or exposure or focusing or some or all of them, deconstructing my previous preconceived notions and formulating new ones to try out the next time, is very rejuvenating, refreshing and calming. High Dynamic Range photography or HDR is a well known technique which in the days of film days, is called dodging and burning. For modern cameras dynamic range (DR) of a sensor has been a key metric in the evolution of the sensor technology. The dynamic range is a ability of a digital camera (sensor) that is measured in terms of how much of a detail is preserved from low light (darkness) to the high light (brightness) at a given exposure, shutter speed and ISO setting. A very large DR has been the holy grail of digital camera sensor manufacturers. One of the key markers of evolution of digital camera sensor technology is the dynamic range.
Imagine you have a brightly lit landscape, say beautiful skies, bright sunshine, in a park like setting where there shadows cast by trees, On a camera with narrow dynamic range, if you expose for low lights, sky gets over exposed, but you shoot for sky rest of the scenery gets dark as shown at the top of the article. So the standard technique is using what is now called as HDR photography, where you take images at different exposures and combine them either in the camera or in a software. The next three images show examples of individual slices of a HDR photo.
Since my camera allows for a finer resolution of 9 images, I took nine images, combined them in software and final result is seen below.
As I am processing the otherwise dull images to result in a vibrant image with shadows showing details and high lights preserved, I had a aha moment. I realized, that perhaps like many others, I am treating happy events as single events, and downers as an aggregation. If I were to flip the process where I aggregate the happy moments in my life, then I will end up with a sum total greater than its parts as shown above. It took me a while to internalize the concept. It is taking much longer to implement the concept. Slowly but steadily I hope to gain upper hand. Removing one pebble at a time from my shoe as I prepare to scale that hill in front of me.
