Category Archives: Flowers

Showy Lady’s Slipper After Rain, Vermont, 2013

Another brand new one.

Kate and I went to the bog where we know these plants are, last Sunday, Father’s Day. We know they usually bloom around then, or the summer solstice. They were beautiful, and we photographed and hung out with them. Then it poured on the way home, and it kept raining through the night. I had a chance to take the time in the morning, when the sun came out, so I got there before the light got too strong. It was a good hunch. I had a really hard time picking one to post, so there may be more of them coming.

This print is for sale here.

Single Apple Blossom Petal Impaled on Grass Blade, 2013

Abruptly switching from the chock-full of chaos and energy images from Nepal from the last few weeks, here’s something more fresh out of the camera from Vermont last week. It was a rainy day, and I almost didn’t go out. I thought maybe the apple petals might be falling though, and the pond-surface was clean with rain. Possibilities. Looking closely I found this one petal, with a bit of a dewy spiderweb on it no less, pierced by a single blade of grass. Maybe the grass blade grew up through the petal, or maybe the petal fell hard enough to get skewered. Neither seems likely. Something like that happened though.

Worth setting the tripod up!

This print is for sale here.

Pale Pink Peony After Rain, 2009

It’s hot here on the east coast, and that has almost gotten me to post more winter snow and ice abstracts. Not that it’s hard to get me to do that. After getting a bit sick of snow and ice a couple of months ago (photographically, as well as experientially), I’m lately finding that when those images come up on my screen I feel an, “Ahh.”

I’ve actually been working with peony images since the last post here, organizing, tagging, and starting to rate the images, which were just sprawled out through the years, coming up every June in the flow of thumbnails. In a very nice way.

Today deciding to really post a winter shot, I was struck by this peony. It’s cool, despite the summer soltice-ey time of year. It’s cool not just because of the water drops and soft colors, but because it’s a splash, in the composition. The splash makes it sort of cool and hot at the same time.

If the heat keeps up (Jeff Masters, meteorologist for the Weather Underground, says this is the warmest 12 months ever. Again.) — if it keeps up I will post some ice.

Stay cool! Enjoy the summer, it flies by.

This print is for sale here.

Phyla of Joy Book Cover

Phyla of Joy Book Cover

I’m flattered that Tupelo Press chose this image for the cover for this book of beautiful poems.

Not only that, but there are other books in the winter spring catalog using my photos too.

As a photographer, I usually don’t mess with the orientation of images, and I only crop if it really helps. But I also like to support creative designers. In this case I’m glad the designer took liberties with the orientation of the image. My original is here. He rotated my horizontal by 90 degrees clockwise and fit the text into the curve. Success!

And then they used it again for the catalog cover. Upside down this time. But you know, it’s better that way, maybe. The catalog cover is here:
Tupelo Press Cover

Sunflower Facing West, November 2010

Sunflower and ice

I’ve been thinking of scanning and posting an old favorite of mine. I’d have to find and scan some 4×4 film, not such a big deal. And I want to do that anyway. But then I got caught up in looking at more recent images, and this very much reminds me of that other one.

This is from the same ice storm as that other image I posted, the stump and weeds.

I’ll try to post that old favorite one next week. It hasn’t been online since the 90s, and I can get a much better scan of it now.

This print is for sale here.

dandelion with centurea 2010

dandelion and centurea

I’m working in a few directions with photography these days, but this is the image making it up here for almost-explicable  reasons. I’m working on scanning some old black and white film, which is amazing. These old pieces of sheet film remind me of the first time I saw a Van Gogh painting up close. I had a shock of recognition: Van Gogh had managed to put some kind of energy — the energy of his mind, his experience, his contact with the world; something intangible but palpable — he had put that energy into each brush stroke. I could feel it, standing there in front of the painting. And I realized that what I was trying to do then as a young man was possible. I didn’t know exactly how to do it, but I had the strong aspiration to contain some kind of energy and awareness into the physical objects, print and film.

I think I sometimes pulled it off, and sometimes still do. These old big pieces of film that I haven’t looked at for many years hit me with a little jolt sometimes, when I get a sense of that some-kind-of-energy trapped in the surface of the silver crystals. But this scanning project is a process just barely underway, and hampered by the same thing my life with sheet film always was — how to find the thing I’m looking for?

The other thread in my thinking is continuing with my interest in the Ukiyo-e, “floating world” composition and aesthetic. I have one of those from last week, new, but I’m not positive it’s good enough to go live.

Anyway, this new image, “dandelion with centurea” is from this spring/early summer. It’s been haunting me a little bit, and I felt compelled to put it online. I like the way it shows the moment as a precarious dot in the space of time. The dandelion gone to seed is at the edge of what it has been, starting the wind-born journey to what it will be. It’s moment is all but gone, yet clearly in focus, master of the moment. And moving into its own is the blue of the early summer garden flower, more than holding its own against the weed.