“[You] may train yourself to find value in the process, and not only in the products, of creative work — in activities such as mindful exploration, experimentation, tinkering, and pursuing whatever ‘what if’ may come to your mind. In adopting such a mindset, even if you are not always successful in terms of producing a good photograph, the time you dedicate to the pursuit of photography will always be rewarding.”
“Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life.”
Hello!
After about a week of freezing weather right around Christmas and a series of rainstorms drenching the southeast on the first few days of the new year, The Photographer hasn’t had much of a chance to head out into nature and snap some new snaps. However — when finishing some cleanup in Lightroom on one of the rainy days — he did recently stumble across a small collection of blooming trees from early last spring, and a batch of photos featuring slinky grapevines from the garden from last summer that, for some reason (nobody knows why!) were never processed and posted. He’s still working on the grapevine photos, but here is the first of two posts with the blooming trees.
The trees in the first five photos are, I believe, cherry trees with their cherry blossoms; and the last four are a hibiscus variety (Thanks, Ann!). The final photo co-stars what can only be described as a busy, happy, tiny wasp.
I don’t necessarily remember the outing during which I took these photos; the trips run together and become indistinguishable after a while. But Lightroom tells me I took them in March of last year and used one of my favorite lenses from the olden days: a 100-300mm Minolta Maxxum XI Zoom lens, originally produced in 1991. Given its zoom range, it’s not one that would typically be used for closeups of flowers, yet even at 300mm it manages to produce some well-focused and richly colored images, where my favorite part is the very lovely background blur behind the subjects — evident especially, below, on the five photos of the cherry blossoms. As with all the old Minolta lenses, they were originally designed for film cameras, and therefore, on a camera like the Sony SLT-A99ii, capture full-frame RAW images that clock in at a whopping 85 megabytes each, filled with trillions (possible exaggeration!) of pixelly globlets that are fun to manipulate in Lightroom. And, for sure, it’s a pleasantly nostalgic experience to bridge a 30-year gap in the history of photography by clicking a 1990s lens to a recent digital camera. Gives me thrills and chills, every time….
“Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”
“Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours?
“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary. If we allow ourselves to be humbled by what we do not and cannot know, in our humility we are exalted. If we allow ourselves to recognize the mystery and the wonder of existence, our fogged minds clear….
“Thinking clearly, we follow wonder to awe, and in a state of awe, we are as close to true wisdom as we will ever be.”
Hello!
Here are a few photos of some sparkly grasses — in color and even sparklier black and white — that Nature waved in the air to help us celebrate the first day of 2023.
No more the scarlet maples flash and burn Their beacon-fires from hilltop and from plain; The meadow-grasses and the woodland fern In the bleak woods lie withered once again.
The trees stand bare, and bare each stony scar Upon the cliffs; half frozen glide the rills; The steel-blue river like a scimitar Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.
Over the upland farm I take my walk, And miss the flaunting flocks of golden-rod; Each autumn flower a dry and leafless stalk, Each mossy field a track of frozen sod.
“There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning….
“The field I am looking at is perhaps twenty acres altogether, long and broad. The sun has not yet risen but is sending its first showers over the mountains, a kind of rehearsal, a slant light with even a golden cast…. The light touches every blade of frozen grass, which then burns as a particular as well as part of the general view. The still-upright weeds have become wands, encased in a temporary shirt of ice and light… Neither does this first light miss the opportunity of the small pond, or the groups of pine trees. And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green….
“It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new.”
Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious turning-within. Where around the dead in the pure receding of sap, boldness is gathered, the boldness of future springtimes. Where imagination occurs beneath what is rigid; where all the green worn thin by the vast summers again turns into a new insight and the mirror of intuition; where the flowers’ color wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.
“The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique….
“A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms — the totality of nature….
“Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce…. Thus in art does Nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.”
Hello!
Autumn color came to my neighborhood pretty late this year, butting up against the Christmas holidays and my Christmas photo project (see Days to Christmas 2022). I had taken quite a few leaf and tree photos in late November and early December, and associated the more brightly colored ones with Christmas on three posts…
… then yesterday went through what was left from those fall color shoots. For this post and the next one, I put together some small galleries of those photos that remained in my catalog — mostly reds and oranges or yellows, all certainly now blown away with the passing through of last week’s winter storm.
