The Sky Outside My Window

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got into photography. Having overly protective parents meant that most of my teenage years were spent cloistered in my room so that I could “study”.

In retrospect, I can safely say that if I spent more time outside that room with my friends, I might have developed better social skills a little earlier in life, and my grades would probably have been no worse. I say this because I spent perhaps less than a tenth of my time in that room on actual studying.

However, I had relative privacy within my room, as long as I maintained the appearance of working. And it was within this privacy that I discovered photography, along with many of my other interests.

It started with the simple impulse to record the beauty outside my window somewhere other than my fallible memory. I lived much of my teenage years in Ipoh, a small beautiful city in Malaysia surrounded by mountains. The apartment that I lived in faced the mountains to the west, and I was regularly treated to spectacular sunsets.

During one particularly beautiful sunset, I noticed the golden shafts of light in the sky and the intricate patterns of light and darkness that it formed on the fluffy clouds. I noticed the subtle gradient of the sky from bright orange to deep blue with thousands of unnamed colors in between.

And I felt sadness.

I knew that I would remember how the sunset made me feel but all the intricate details that I was seeing would forever be lost to time. I wished for some of that beauty to be remembered.

So I started taking pictures on an old Sony Cybershot

The sky has moods.

People express their moods through their expressions, their speech and their actions. The sky expresses her moods through color, sound and weather. Sometimes she is bright and happy and fills my mind with energy.

On other days, the sky is more serene and thoughtful. She tells you to slow down and ponder.

I learned many things from these photos when I took them. But I learned even more from going over them over a decade later. One thing that struck me was how different the same scene can look on different days, or even at different times of the day. The sky has moods. And the moods can change as quickly and drastically as those of people. A gray rainy evening can turn into a blinding golden sunset in minutes. A peaceful sky can turn into a thunderstorm in the time it takes to finish math homework.

The sky taught me to not give up too early on anything. Long after the sunset, the sun can still reach out from beneath the horizon to give you a special good-night.

People crave what they cannot have. I’m sure my impressions of the beauty outside my window was amplified by thoughts how how I was not able to go out as much as I’d like.

Of course, freedom was on my mind a lot at the time. The freedom to pursue my own path, to follow interests as they arose, and simply to live life on my own terms.

Looking back, I can see a lot of that longing in the photographs. Almost every photo I took from that room had the same thing between the camera and the landscape: a pane of glass. Sometimes it is barely noticeable, visible only as a speck of dust or a smudge floating out of focus. In others, especially those where I focused on the window rather than the landscape beyond it, the barrier is impossible to miss.

I was always dreaming of being out there, but I got used to being inside.

Perhaps that is why, even today, there is sometimes a strange moment of hesitation before I go out and do something I want to do. Some part of me still expects something to get in the way. What’s the point of making plans when they’re only going to be canceled anyway?

But the moment I actually step outside, that feeling begins to disappear. When I’m out with my camera, on my feet and moving through the world, I feel in control of my own life. I am where I want to be, doing something I chose to do.

These days, I try to notice when that old hesitation appears and treat it as a signal to do the opposite: pick up my camera and go outside. I’ve learned to trust the impulse that tells me to go somewhere, explore, and make beautiful images.

Photography has become a way of learning to listen to myself. There is a voice inside me that spent a long time being very small, and taking photographs gives me a space in which I can hear it. I think it’s because every photograph begins with a series of tiny, personal decisions: I want to go there. I like this light. I find this beautiful. I want to see what happens if I stay a little longer.

So for me, photography is about more than creating beautiful images, although I certainly enjoy doing that. It is an act of meditation on what the world is showing me, and to what I want from it.

Finding my artistic voice means asking myself what I want to see and what I want to create. There is nobody else who can answer those questions for me. I don’t have to keep an audience entertained or make anyone else happy. Nobody has commissioned these photographs. I get nothing from taking them except the experience itself.

They are mine. I photograph the things that I find beautiful.

For a long time, I photographed the world I wanted to be part of from behind a pane of glass.

Now, when that world calls to me, I try to go outside.