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Praise For A Naturalistic Design
Continue ReadingOur image shows a designed garden with some formal components — straight and repeated lines and arranged groupings — just enough geometry to produce year-round bone structure. Overall the grounds appear as if naturally and spontaneously created, the engineering softened and concealed nicely by the architect with flowing and curved elements.
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Specimen — Massive Cottonwood Tree
Continue ReadingThis image comes from a locally significant nature preserve, mostly unknown among people from the larger world. On my last visit a prominently placed chalkboard on a wall in the visitor center listed more than two hundred wildlife sightings, occurring within one week — from tiny lizards to bobcats to birds of many kinds. Trees […]
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Specimen — Wild Apple Tree
Continue ReadingI made this picture near the entrance to a famous hiking trail in Arizona. In fact the place is so heavily visited and well-trodden there is typically a wait for a parking place. In earlier times this land was privately owned and farmed, planted with orchards bearing nuts and fruits to feed its historical inhabitants. […]
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Did It Really Look Like That?
Continue ReadingWhen I have shown pictures like this viewers frequently ask, “Did it really look like that?” Sometimes it is hard to convince people of the truth I have seen with my own eyes. There is so much possibility for deception anymore — and so many folks holding hardened opinions — it is often fruitless to […]
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A View From Sarah’s Kitchen
Continue ReadingI made this still life picture during a visit to Clarksdale, Mississippi at night from inside a soul food restaurant doubling as a nightclub — a mythical location in the homeland of Delta Blues now permanently shuttered, its founder Mizz Sarah deceased. The blues we heard that evening seemed a gritty, deep-feeling music. I believe […]
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The Power of Diagonals
Continue ReadingA slanted line creates a vector resulting in at least two (explicit or implied) triangles — a simple yet strong armature upon which to build a composition. Here the central diagonal incorporates the curvaceous qualities of an arabesque. Coincidences and other hard lines abound, made softer and more like a dream by reflections and fortuitous […]
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Quoting From Images, Vol. 2
Continue ReadingMany notables have photographed this wall of stains above White House Ruin. None that I know made images from this head-on wide-angle perspective portraying so much of the canyon wall. I am quoting from the work of two men, one at work in the 19th Century (Timothy O’Sullivan) and the other from the 20th […]
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A Curious Surrealism
Continue ReadingA strange scene like this seldom appears in the normal course of things; typically this must be manufactured — through double exposure or later sandwiching of frames. Finding a truly surreal image in real time is rare as platinum. This juxtaposition occurred during a musical performance when the piano man’s hand was somehow projected […]
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Entering the Phenomenological Realm
Continue ReadingPhenomenology — an extravagant word meaning the study of how things appear to us in our conscious — or lived — experience. Anger counts as this sort of phenomenon, while believing the sun will rise tomorrow in the East does not. Philosophers are fond of asking questions we might consider tedious, like: “Is there […]
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