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

Southeastern Winter Abstracts (2 of 2)

Hello. Here’s an additional set of abstract photos from my recent photo-jaunts around the neighborhood.

More on this series here: Southeastern Winter Abstracts (1 of 2).

Previous related photos are here: Work, Walk, Discover: Hydrangeas in Winter.

Thanks for taking a look! Hope your new year is off to a GREAT start!

Southeastern Winter Abstracts (1 of 2)

From The Photographer’s Mind: Creative Thinking for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman:

“[What] inspires a photographer to raise the camera may be entirely without substance, something that pervades the entire scene. In this case, Iโ€™m specifically thinking about light, and most of us at some time simply find the lighting conditions so attractive or interesting that we want to photograph them interacting with something, anything. Exactly what the light is striking becomes much less important than its own quality…. Color, too, attracts the attention of some photographers as a subject in its own right. Even more than light, it offers the possibilities of abstracted compositions in which the color combinations themselves appeal, regardless of what physical objects they are part of.”

From More Than a Rock: Essays on Art, Creativity, Photography, Nature, and Life by Guy Tal:

“It may seem that the photographic medium, recording light reflected off actual subjects, is unsuitable for abstraction, but this is obviously not true. Like any other artist, the photographer may willingly omit significant details to force their viewers into an experience they may not notice if distracted by the literal recognition of superfluous elements. 

“In a sense, every photograph extracts a selection of elements from a greater context, allowing the artist to isolate such things as line, pattern, and form by means of careful composition, to a point where the literal subject may become altogether unrecognizable. As such, in photography we can talk not only about a work being abstract or literal, but also about degrees of abstraction.”

As I mentioned in a previous post — Work, Walk, Discover: Hydrangeas in Winter — I’m working on several sets of photos from numerous walks through the ‘hood, where I’m hunting out bits of winter color. For this post and the next one, I separated out those images that were more abstract — those with simple or stark shapes and textures. Here’s the first batch, showing the presence of a dominant color (or two) against a textured natural or manmade (concrete, stone, or brick) background.

Here’s the second batch. On one side of a roadway that bisects the cemetery gardens, there are a dozen flowering dogwoods that, of course, have lost their leaves but are already beginning to produce buds that will burst out as new flowers in late February or early March. These eight photos — simply colored, monochromatic, almost black-and-white — seemed to work out well because it was a cloudy day and the filtered sunlight gave their whites and grays (as well as muted blues and background greens), a bit of silver cast that processed nicely in Lightroom.

From the first two photos, you can see how densely the branches and buds on a single tree are packed; and behind them are another dozen or so additional dogwoods that added to the sense that there are hundreds more flowery branches, just dormantly biding their time. While walking among these trees, I found just one remaining spent leaf turned by autumn, the tiny marionette — surprise! — in the last photo.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Happy New Year!!

From Billy and the Minpins by Roald Dahl:

“No child has ever had such an exciting young life as Little Billy, and no child has ever kept such a huge secret so faithfully. He never told a soul about the Minpins. 

“I myself have been very careful not to tell you where they live, and I am not about to tell you now. But if by some extraordinary chance you should one day wander into a forest and catch a glimpse of a Minpin, then hold your breath and thank your lucky stars because up to now, so far as I know, no one excepting Little Billy has ever seen one. 

“Watch the birds as they fly above your heads and, who knows, you might well spy a tiny creature riding high on the back of a swallow or a raven.

“Watch the robin especially because it always flies low, and you might see a nervous young Minpin perched on the feathers having its first flying lesson. 

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places….” 



Walk, Work, Discover: Hydrangeas in Winter

From “The Walker’s Waking Dreams — Rousseau” in A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros:

Rousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking…. It was during long walks that the ideas would come, on the road that sentences would spring to his lips, as a light punctuation of the movement; it was paths that stimulated his imagination….

“Walk, work, discover…. Trampling the earth with his heavy shoes, disappearing into the brush, wandering among ancient trees. 

“Alone, and surrounded — or rather filled — with the quiet murmur of animals and trees, the sigh of wind through the leaves, the rattle and creak of branches. Alone, and fulfilled. Because now he could breathe, breathe and surrender to a well-being slow as a forest path, without any thrill of pleasure but absolutely peaceful. A lukewarm happiness, persistent as a monotonous day: happiness just to be there, to feel the rays of a winter sun on his face and hear the muffled creaking of the forest.”

I’ve been prowling my neighborhood, hunting for splashes of winter color. I’ve ended out with a large, slightly unwieldy batch of photos that I’m organizing into a half dozen galleries, that I’ll be working on and posting over the next week or so. Unlike summer and spring here in the southeast, green no longer dominates the scenes that become my photographs. Where green is present, it’s typically found in hardy grasses; or more commonly, among the ivy varieties whose color shifts from deep green to a shadow-filled version, where aqua or blue are emphasized by seasonal changes and the softer light of a winter sun. Backgrounds, especially, transition toward muted gray, chocolatey brown, and pastel variations of yellow, orange, and gold. My eye moves toward the surprising shapes and textures of plants in their dormant stages, and how those forms stand out as abstractions of their growing season versions.

The two galleries below include images of hydrangeas — bits of hydrangeas — that I found shaded by the trees of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first gallery features those where pink and red was still present on the leaves, after their fall turn and while still barely attached to their stems. The white filaments on some of the leaves — a form of mold or fungus — presented some interesting (that is, frustrating) challenges for the photographer because their contrast with the red shades created a difficult-to-overcome sense that they were out of focus … fuzzy, that is. To (attempt to) improve their appearance, I used radial filters in Lightroom individually over each of the leaves, reducing whites, highlights, and saturation then adding a bit of texture and sharpening to emphasize the veins in the leaves over the cottony fungus.

Except for the last photo below, this second gallery shows side-by-side pairs of the same clumps of spent flower clusters, framed differently. I did very little post-processing on these nine images, mainly some brightness and shadow changes to soften and darken the backgrounds and emphasize the remnants of the buds — which through the zoom lens looked almost like they were suspended in mid-air, held up as they were by tiny threads. Our eyes tend to pass over sights like this; but zoom and macro lenses provide a view of the world that our unaided sight typically misses.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

A Dog, a Koala Bear, a Dodo Bird, and a Ladybug

From Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz:

“Part of normal human development is the refinement of sensory sensitivity: specifically, learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, space, sound, texture, smell, but we can’t function if we perceive everything at once. So our sensory systems, concerned for our survival, organize to heighten attention to those things that are essential to our existence. The rest of the details are trifles to us, smoothed over, or missed altogether. 

“But the world still holds those details. The dog senses the world at a different granularity. The dog’s sensory ability is sufficiently different to allow him to attend to the parts of the visual world we gloss over; to the elements of a scent we cannot detect; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. Neither does he see or hear everything, but what he notices includes what we do not. With less ability to see a wide range of colors, for instance, dogs have a much greater sensitivity to contrasts in brightness…. Without speech, they are more attuned to the prosody in our sentences, to tension in our voice, to the exuberance of an exclamation point and the vehemence of capital letters. They are alert to sudden contrasts in speaking: a yell, a single word, even a protracted silence. 

“As with us, the dog’s sensory system is attuned to novelty. Our attention focuses on a new odor, a novel sound; dogs, with a wider range of things they smell and hear, can seem to be constantly at attention…. [A] city can be an explosion of small details writ large in the dog’s mind: a cacophony of the everyday that we have learned to ignore. We know what a car door slamming sounds like, and unless listening for just that sound, city dwellers tend to not even hear the symphony of slams playing on the street. For a dog, though, it may be a new sound each time it happens….

“They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks, the complement of what we see,,,, Human habits that we ignore — tapping our fingers, cracking our ankles, coughing politely, shifting our weight — dogs notice. A shuffle in a seat — it may foretell rising! A scootch forward in the chair — surely something is happening! Scratching an itch, shaking your head: the mundane is electric…. Details become more meaningful when they are not swallowed up in the concerns of the everyday….”

“Happiness is novelty — new toys, new treats — in a safe, well-known place…. the new requires attention and prompts activity.”

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Know, and Smell by Alexandra Horowitz is an excellent romp through the sensory lives of dogs. I’ve featured quotes from another book by Horowitz — On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation — here a few times, and while that book includes some references to observation from both a human’s and dog’s point of view, Inside of a Dog dives deeply into the minds of dogs and how they experience the world, especially the relationships between human-world and dog-world.

If you have a dog, like dogs, or are interested in animals generally, Inside of a Dog will change how you see them. The book contrasts human senses with dog senses, developing a perspective that shifts between how we, as humans, understand the world primarily in verbal, linguistic means to how dogs and other animals perceive it in non-linguistic terms. For animals, the world is primarily one of contrasts, colors, motion, sounds, and smells, all processed cognitively not as words but as (what we would call) images, yet there lives are still ripe with various forms of non-verbal communication along with active imaginations, creativity in play, and integration of new experiences and feelings. If you are a photographer, you may already tend to see the world in snapshots and images; yet consider, if you can, how your awareness of your surroundings would be altered if imagery without words was your primary means of experiencing the world around you.

As the quotes at the top represent, novelty is a big deal for dogs; something new generates an immediate, intense interest. My dog Lobo got three new toys for Christmas (two from me, a koala bear and a dodo bird), and one from a friend (the ladybug), all of which were coveted before I even got the tags cut off. He’s developed a very clear expectation that boxes (“whatever those are”) contains toys (“we know toys!”), and tried — despite his small size and the improbability of success — to snatch the box containing the ladybug off my dining room table, giving me that special canine side-eye look when I hid the box in a cabinet. The novelty wears off quickly, of course, replaced in a few hours with proximity (the nearest toy gets nabbed at the start of a sprint through the house), or maybe a combination of smell and a bit of possessiveness (the last one the human touched becomes the most important one), and many of them get rides in the jaws at some point every day….


… And then … he rests, for a few minutes, anyway…. ๐Ÿ™‚


Thanks for reading and taking a look!