Squat man in tweed photographs tree in throes of spring explosion. Berlin, circa 2004

Settling late one early spring morning into the pale golden hues of a weissbier on Oranienstrasse, I spied a squat old man sporting ill-fitting tweed shuffling in a trance-like state towards a tree. His subject was bursting at the seams with blossoms trapped suggestively on the spectrum between fuchsia and white.

On arrival at the root of the spectacle, the man paused for a while and then dipped unexpectedly, gracefully swinging a mid-length zoom attached to a camera from his shoulder into his two primed palms.

After a period of scrutiny, a decision was made, and he slowly raised his elbows, lifted the apparatus, and trained his zoom on a flower, thus demonstrating again, and beyond refutation, the garment's completely conflictual relationship to its owner.
I engaged my knowledge of light and physics and, given what I thought to be the focal length of the zoom and the distance from the last element to the tree, figured he'd filled the fame with a single blossom pistil front and centre.

The man shifted in delicate increments around the semi-shaded section of the tree for an hour without modulating his ultra-focus. And then he turned and shuffled away, vanishing down the cool alley from which he'd emerged, leaving on the square a masterclass in seeing.

Whenever I spot a redundant zoom waiting with deluded confidence on a trestle table for a buyer, I think of the old man's cameo and the profound lesson in the power of the amateur photographer's ability to pay real attention.