731 - Pretty Flower in Your Backyard

OK, here we are with the images of Monday. With the exception of the last, I shot them all in a park just 200 meters from work, and as always lately I used the new Sigma 50/1.4.

It was the last chance to capture some rays of sun. There is a playground with many children as well, but for obvious reasons I kept to trees and flowers. Oh dear! What a world!

It’s interesting: the longer I take photographs, the more it is clear to me what I suspected from the beginning: that my kind of photography is not bound to locations. It is bound to a state of mind.

It is kind of an emptiness, but not in any negative way. It is an openness without purpose and direction, it may be what Mark Hobson, “The Landscapist”, calls “pure seeing”.

Experience is also a factor. Yes, it’s without purpose and direction, but in that state of mind I run on autopilot, follow my instincts. I wander around and only see, but experience helps a lot.

And then there is the fractal nature of things. Everything in nature is fuzzy. Look at a tree. Try to describe its shape. Oh no, not the shape that you have come to identify as a tree when you were a child. I don’t ask you to describe the shape of the concept “tree”, I ask you to look at any particular tree of your choice, and to describe its shape. Complicated, huh?

So is everything in nature, and it get’s only more multifaceted when you begin to change your point of view. Get back to the tree. Again, not the concept, the one from our last exercise. Look at it, and while you look at it, slowly walk around. It does not matter in what distance, it does not matter if clockwise or counter-clockwise, it is only important to look at the tree.

Now tell me: how many shapes does it have?

The Song of the Day is “Pretty Flower in Your Backyard” by Leadbelly. I have it on disc 45 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”. Hear a sample here.