The Water Lily at Crathes and Photography as Prayer, Kind Of.

The right moment, on the right day, at the right place, a picture like this is possible.

The rain has nearly stopped and enough of the sun glints through grey clouds to create a shadow from white and pink.

The entire pond is opaque, the water unrippled and still, and there is only this one flower, a jewel set in metallic grey-green.

At such moments a camera is like a prayer book, but one in which there are no words, only images. And indeed each image has first to be seen, perceived, noticed, and then attention paid to the isness of what is there. So rather than a prayer of glad wonder at an encounter with beauty, taking the picture is more prayer in anticipation, and the digital image a means of grace to be attended to later.

Photographs are 'experience captured', according to Susan Sontag. That is only true when we recognise that what we capture is the image which may resurrect, or recall, or remind, of the experience. But that moment standing under a dripping tree holding the camera still, on a dull afternoon touched by fugitive sunlight, absorbed by beauty and being reminded by another of Sontag's cautions, that photographs 'enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at'.

In the same way that God is not there for the taking, or for the taking for granted, so a photo isn't mere object for our enjoyment. Sontag spoke of photography as "memory in acquisitive mood." Henri Cartier Bresson understood the need for this reverent reticence which holds our grasping in check: "A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you." Prayer and photography have this in common; each is our response to the initiative of another, and in that responsiveness is our salvation.

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