Leaning into It -This story begins before the picture was taken.

When I am trying to get where I am going in a hurry it is easy to forget that I am already somewhere. The world disappears into some imagined important future. In the early 1980s, I made a number of road trips through the Midwestern United States, and often took the road less traveled through backroads on my way from Colorado to Indiana to see family.

On this particular day, I was going slow enough to see the round window on a barn. It caught my eye. In those days, I still shot in film, like Kodachrome, and nearly always used a tripod. It wasn’t just to keep the camera steady, it also allowed a more precise way, as Georgia O’Keeffe suggested to, “Fill the frame in a beautiful way.”

After I had tightened the camera on the tripod and looked into the viewfinder, I entered a new world. Everything outside that little window on the camera had completely disappeared. It was terribly interesting and beautiful. It was quiet.

It took a good ten minutes to set it up to find the right arrangement for the shot with the white windows of the barn and the tree. However, I did not know what to do with the bright empty area in the picture on the right; it created a distracting bright area on the image that drew attention away from the subject of the image. (When we look at any picture our eye will go to the brightest part of the image first.) In the midst of pondering what to do, I heard the sound of a tractor. Almost immediately a farmer moved from left to right through the picture.

It was like trying to manipulate events in a lucid dream. I imagined that, even though the area was tight, the farmer would drive his tractor behind the barn, and when he did, he would fill in the empty space in my photo. He did it exactly as I had pictured it. Frame per frame, it was if like we had rehearsed it a dozen times.

It was a good thing I had the camera on a tripod. I didn’t have to think about anything except when to pick the perfect 250th of second to capture the shot. That was easy because I had already seen it before.

I watched the farmer drive off and wondered if I really had gotten the picture. I imagined how it would feel to look at the image for the first time, in a week or two, when I got home and had the film processed. It was just as I pictured it.