Tears in a Bottle

I rarely shoot setup shots. I'm not big on studio portrait kind of stuff. I can do it, but I don't like it all that much. I like using natural light and shooting candidly. So when I go out shooting, I'm always looking for a good, real image that’s not staged. This image really goes against my style.

I usually get up an hour earlier than I need to for personal devotions, and it's just the way I function in my day. I was reminded of a scripture from the Book of Psalms about how God collects all of our tears and puts them in a bottle, and I thought that was really an odd concept. We're talking about why God would take all our tears and place them in a bottle. I decided that I wanted to visualize what that looked like. So I worked very hard trying to figure out how to put this together so it would look relevant to the theme.

I bought all these bottles, and I filled them with olive oil. Not all the way up, I just filled them to a lower level with olive oil, and I put them in a tray. I remember laughing at myself, thinking this was not the kind of thing I did. But in this case, I just felt inspired.

So I drove to Ventura Beach, CA. It was an hour before sunset, and I was starting to have second thoughts about the idea. Add the fact that it was really cold that evening, and I felt like a five-year-old presenting ideas at a Mensa conference. It's just not my style to shoot this way. I just felt like I needed to press on. So I'm sitting there in the parking lot waiting for the sun to get closer to the horizon. I really wanted there to be some cool clouds in the background, so I could get a backlit look on the clouds as well as on the bottles. But imagination doesn't always work out in real life.

I was stinking freezing. I didn't bring a jacket. I'm out there in a T-shirt and shorts, with my camera, and I have this tray full of bottles of olive oil. I remember thinking, “I’m just going to go home. This is not working out.” And I got back in my car, and I sat in there, watching the sun creep down. I was like a whiny little school boy. "You just drove an hour to get here. You already set all this stuff up. You've got all this. Why not just shoot it? Even if it stinks, who knows, you might actually get lucky."

A few people were walking by on the bike path. I was lying in the sand, and if you know me, I was about 80 pounds heavier than I am right now. So getting down, lying on my stomach on the sand, that's an image in and of itself that's probably more interesting than what I was attempting to shoot. But lying in the sand, I just started shooting. I had about 15, 20 shots, just watching the sun go down, and I wasn't all that thrilled with what I was seeing.

Attitude is everything in a moment like that. I don't really get a clear sense of what things look like when I’m agitated. "Okay, I did my duty. I shot my shots." I jumped in my car, turned on the heater, and drove home. And, as is usually the case when I try something new and work hard, positive results show up in post-production.

This is what I saw, and I just love it. I love the backlit, the orangish hue through the olive oil in the bottles. It made me feel like they were really tears in a bottle, waiting to be opened and protected.

You have collected all my tears and preserved them in a bottle! You have recorded every one of them in your book. Psalms 56:8