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"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Found Blooms! (1 of 2)

From Another Day Not Wasted: Meditations in Photography, Art, and Wildness by Guy Tal:

“[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.”

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard:

“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….

Thanks for reading and taking a look!






New Year’s Day 2023: Happy New Year!

From “Winter Hours” in Winter Hours by Mary Oliver:

“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?”

From “Journals (1858)” in The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau:

“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?

“The voice of nature is always encouraging.”

From A Big Little Life by Dean Koontz:

“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.

Happy New Year!








Autumn Remnants (2 of 2)

From “December” by Christopher Cranch in Three Centuries of American Poetry edited by Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D. Richardson:

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.

From “Wordsworth’s Mountain” in Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver:

“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.”


Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring the last of my autumn color photos for this season. The first post is Autumn Remnants (1 of 2); and three related posts are Autumn Dreams of Christmas (1 of 2); Autumn Dreams of Christmas (2 of 2); and Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating.

That’s it for me for 2022! See you on the other side! Of New Year’s Eve, that is.

Thanks for taking a look!






Autumn Remnants (1 of 2)

From “O Lacrimosa” in Ahead of All Parting by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Ah, but the winters! The earthโ€™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 flowersโ€™ color
wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.

From “Nature” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“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…

Autumn Dreams of Christmas (1 of 2)

Autumn Dreams of Christmas (2 of 2)

Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating

… 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.

Thanks for taking a look!





Merry Christmas!

From “Christmas Trees” in Christmas: A Short History from Solstice to Santa by Andy Thomas:

“A good candidate for the first proper Christmas tree can be found in a German legend from the 1500s. A popular tale credits the reformer Martin Luther with the inspiration. Walking through frosty woods on Christmas Eve, he was so struck with the starlight glittering on icicle-hung tree branches that he brought one home to his family. He is also said to have been the first to light up a tree; inspired by the bright stars in the sky, he attached candles to the branches to remind them all of the heavens from where Jesus came. Even now, many trees are topped with a star or an angel (or a fairy for the more secular), making a clear link to the Nativity story….

“By the 1920s, trees were installed in most homes of many countries, candles turned to electric lights, and today Christmas just would not seem right without a tree somewhere. Glistening with enchanting colors, there is something truly transcendent about a well-dressed Christmas tree, pulling us into a different state of mind — out of darkness and into light.”

From “Christmas Day and Everyday” by George MacDonald in The Ultimate Christmas Collection:

Star high
Baby low:
โ€˜Twixt the two
Wise men go;
Find the baby,
Grasp the star
Heirs of all things
Near and far!

From “Christmas Day” in Old Christmas by Washington Irving:

“The window of my chamber looked out upon what in summer would have been a beautiful landscape. There was a sloping lawn, a fine stream winding at the foot of it, and a tract of park beyond, with noble clumps of trees, and herds of deer. At a distance was a neat hamlet, with the smoke from the cottage chimneys hanging over it; and a church with its dark spire in strong relief against the clear cold sky….

“The house was surrounded with evergreens, according to the English custom, which would have given almost an appearance of summer; but the morning was extremely frosty; the light vapour of the preceding evening had been precipitated by the cold, and covered all the trees and every blade of grass with its fine crystallisations. The rays of a bright morning sun had a dazzling effect among the glittering foliage.”


Below Iโ€™ve accumulated all my photo galleries from this yearโ€™s โ€œDays to Christmasโ€ series. Click the links above each gallery if you would like to see the original posts and the quotations I selected to go with them. 

Thanks for reading, and taking a look โ€ฆ and:

Merry Christmas!!!


Ten Days to Christmas: Peace! and Birds! and Beasts!







Nine Days to Christmas: Silver and Gold






Eight Days to Christmas: Red and Green







Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating







Six Days to Christmas: Angels and Nutcrackers and Wintry Blues









Five Days to Christmas: Yule Frogs!






Four Days to Christmas: Winter Solstice/Candle Night






Three Days to Christmas: Toys and Games








Two Days to Christmas: Santa Claus Rhapsody







One Day to Christmas: Happy Christmas Eve!