I recently watched an inspiring conversation between cinematographer Louie Schwartzberg and Marie Forleo. Check out their conversation here. Louie has captured nature’s beauty and awesome-ness in time lapse photography, including Wings of Life about the relationships of pollinators and flowers and narrated by Meryl Streep.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes from Louie. You can check out his work here and his TED talk on nature, beauty, and gratitude here.
[On filming hummingbirds with time lapse photography]…We live in this narrow world. We’re recording at 24 frames per second. That’s the human POV (point of view). What a wonderful way to expand your mind and your consciousness, to realize there are so many different ways to looking at life, what is real. In slow motion with the hummingbirds, it put you into their world of seeing the combat, the twirls, and all those acrobatics. To our eyes, it’s just a blur. You see a hummingbird go by like that. (Quickly,) there it went. To be in their world, to see it from their point of view, it opens your heart. It makes you appreciate life. It makes you appreciate hummingbirds. It may make you put up a feeder in your backyard. That’s good because I think it generates compassion by being present and mindful and gratitude.
Nature’s beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude.
Beauty and seduction are nature’s tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens are hearts and makes us realize we are a part of nature and not separate from it.
I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.
When people see my images a lot of times they will say ‘Oh my God.’ Have you ever wondered what that meant? The ‘oh’ means it caught your attention, it makes you present, it makes you mindful. The ‘my’ means it connects with something deep inside your soul, it creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And God, ‘God’ is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we are connected to a universe that celebrates life.
We’re giants, and we’re unaware of things that are too small for us to see.
When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it’s the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down.
The sound of a million butterflies flapping their wings is indescribable. It’s very heavenly.