Category Archives: garden

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.

Leek, Frost, Black and White 2010

Leek and Frost

This photo isn’t a prize iPad lock screen image or home screen image, which was a roll I was on last week, but I did find it while flicking through a catalog on the iPad. It struck me, strikes me, to be very much of the lineage of large format based silver prints I used to make in the darkroom in the early 80s. This looks a lot like an 8 X 10 I might pull out of one of my archival boxes of silver prints I made in the darkroom. It’s kind of surprising it came from a digital camera.

The good gray tones, textures, a wild composition with strong lines — it has all the stuff I used to try to do. I’m not positive I like it, but I think I do. I know I’m not the same person who made those other photos back then with the big film camera, but there is some echo, some thread. Very mysterious.

This photo is no longer on the site as for sale, but email me if you’d like to buy a print.

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.