Greetings!

 

A few days ago, a friend commented on the fact that the vast majority of my pictures – however good they might be technically – are fundamentally rather cold, impersonal, portraits of a single bird, bug, or plane.  And I have to agree with him!  So, I have spent some time during the week sorting out a few images that hopefully break out of that mold.  Some of you have seen some of them before.

 

Most of these pictures speak for themselves, but I will comment that #5 shows a katydid nymph (i.e. juvenile) inside a day lily flower, while #9 shows a lichen growing on the top of a sawn-off utility pole!

 

I would also like to expound on a bit on #8.  I included this image in an essay I wrote almost exactly three years ago. To paraphrase what I said at the time, I had been working through photos I had taken at the beach earlier that month, when I realized that, in one image in particular, I was being drawn semi-consciously towards a feeling captured in the paintings of David Caspar Friedrich, some of which I have admired since being introduced to them in my late teens.  Friedrich is described as a German landscape painter, although it must be remembered that in the period of his lifetime (1774-1840) the boundaries of Northern Europe were very different from now, indeed they were in constant upheaval, and he was actually born in what was then called Swedish Pomerania, but is now a part of present-day Germany.  More about him can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich .  But for the purposes of this essay, one of the most important points of his career is, and I quote from Wikipedia, “[He} . . .anticipated . . . the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists”.

 

I would like to think that my image bears some similarity to Freidrich’s Twilight at Seaside, which you can see at https://www.wikiart.org/en/caspar-david-friedrich/wc-cr-puscule-en-bord-de-mer-1819-1819-hermitage-museum-135-170-cm-53-1-66-9-in-oil-on-canvas  .  My picture shows pre-dawn twilight rather than post sunset, but the coloring is similar.  I would also like to mention – as I did three years ago – the influence of a presentation I had recently attended given by

local award-winning professional photographers Tom Ramsay and Nancy Goetzinger entitled “The Luminous Landscape: Mastering the Art of Light in Photography”.  One of the themes of the fascinating and inspiring talk was how the problems and solutions faced by landscape photographers parallel those developed over the centuries by landscape artists around the world.

 

Have a great week!