Descending Ashtray

I was looking through some pictures from a trip last summer and I came accross this one.  At first, I thought that it did not turn out very well and almost deleted it. But the more I looked at it the more my perspective began to change.

When I took the picture, I was hoping to zoom in on the flower but the auto focus on the camera saw things differently, thus bringing the middle ground into focus.  Instead of the obvious flower being the focal point, I starting seeing the texture of the wet rocks, the translucent leaves whose tips were decaying and the dark silouette of plant stems.  The composition also seemed to work well, everything points toward the center.  Almost as if there is a hole you can look through.

Looking at things in this way reminded me of the documentary (What the bleep do we know?) that I watched last weekend.  One of the examples that they used to show how we see only what we want to see, was a story about about the native americans.  When Columbus’s ships first came to america the natives could not see them at all.  There was nothing in their minds to reference what they could possibly be.  So they simply did not see them.  The only way they did finally see them was that the medicine man noticed strange ripples in the water from the ships.  Trying to figure out what was causing the ripples he slowly became able to see the ships.  What a strange concept!  But it does make me wonder what it is that we see and what we are capable of really seeing.