Ben & Jen Shepard

It’s an addictive sound.  That satisfyingly indubitable click of the shutter capturing forever what your eye can catch for barely a moment.  Suddenly you start to see everything as an image worth freezing, an opportunity, a possibility for great beauty or irony or laughter.  You start to actually see the world in its detail, and to imagine what you can make of it.  All this starts with a click.

We bought our Nikon D40 Digital SLR camera back in August.  Ben, having taken college courses in photography and worked at a portrait studio, has wanted a DSLR for a long time.  I liked the idea of getting into photography too.  I just didn’t realize at the time the wide worlds of creativity to which it could connect me.

Before we made this substantial purchase, I researched cameras for weeks.  In addition to figuring out which camera was best for us, I learned about aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, metering and a host of other technical things that you never have to worry about with a point-and-shoot digital camera.  Once you have control over these aspects of the camera, though, almost anything is possible!

I love taking pictures of animals.  If you saw how many pictures of the cats we have you might wonder if they weren’t subbing in as children.  I swear they are not, it’s just that they provide me with such good practice subjects.  Get them outside and they are so expressive, everything from the dramatic to the hilarious.  When we go to Ben’s parent’s house I have tremendous amounts of fun photographing, Snicker, his mom’s Golden Doodle.  The dog is such a rag doll, it’s wonderful!  He has so much personality to try to fit into that lens.

One day, when we have horses, I will photograph them all the time too.  I will have pictures of them all over my house, in large frames, galloping across my walls.  I can see it if I close my eyes.  Black and whites of stoic close-ups, green pastures vivifying black and brown and gray manes and tales, a big nose reaching down to sniff the camera as I capture a different perspective.  It thrills my deepest heart.

Well, it’s not really fair of me to talk all about photographs without posting a few.  So here’s a smattering….

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

I am a Henry VIII junkie, so when my boss loaned me her copy of The Boleyn Inheritance, I gobbled it up in no time.  This novel is brilliant because it tells the tale of Henry’s fourth and fifth wives from the point of view of three different women: Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, Katheryn Howard the fifth wife, and Jane Rochford, the wife of Anne Boleyn’s brother.  The story is not told in traditional form, but in fictional letters written by each of these women.  If you don’t know much about the Henry VIII saga in British history, here it is in short.

In 1509, at 17 years of age, Henry married the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, the young devout Catholic widow of his late brother.  After 24 years of marriage to Catherine (with many affairs along the way) he met Anne Boleyn and fell into a reckless obsession with her.  He chased her for 8 years, but she would not be his mistress unless he divorced Catherine and married her, making her Queen of England.  For several years Henry worked viciously to divorce Catherine.  The Great Matter, as it was called, involved all his court, the heads of several other countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope himself. The upheaval it caused in Britain would change the course of European history for centuries. Finally, on what is believed to be false accusations regarding Catherine’s virginity when she married Henry, he divorced her and married Anne.  Henry and Anne’s marriage lasted about 3 years.  From the start other upper-class families competing with the Boleyns for power and those who opposed Anne’s revolutionary Protestant thinking began to plot her demise.  Ultimately, it was her failure to bear Henry a son and Henry’s new interest in the young Jane Seymour that became her undoing.  With Henry’s signature and many false accusations against her (amongst which were numerous affairs with men including her brother) Henry’s great love was tried and beheaded.  The next day he became engaged to Jane, who died in childbirth not long after.  Henry went several years without marrying again, until his chief minister suggested he take Anne of Cleves, a German noblewoman, for his wife for political reasons.  This is where The Boleyn Inheritance begins.

Usually it is Anne Boleyn who gets all the attention in the Henry VIII story because of all the political drama and intrigue surrounding her fall.  However, this novel focuses on the lives of those who survive Anne, each of whom inherit something of her life and her death.  Unfortunately, only one of them survives Henry’s increasingly mad and violent temperament.  Going beyond historical fact alone, Gregory explores the motives, emotions and inner lives of the later wives and those involved in the constant struggle for power.  Not everything in this novel is hisorically accurate, but part of the fun of historical novels is the embellishments that create a vividly dramatic tale.  That’s not to say that the actual King Henry VIII didn’t supply plenty of real-life drama for everyone.  If you don’t know much about his life, check it out.  It’s a wild ride and it’s all true!