An Essay in Red

  

Red Letter Day...


On those rainy summer days at the cottage, when one is played out, fished out and the only chores left are outside jobs, a well stocked library can be ever so brightening. One shelf is stacked with old National Geographics. The articles are always enlightening, something new to be learned at the turn of every page. I like looking at the ads! But what I find most striking has got to be the photographs!

Romour has it that shooters for National Geo always took a red bandanna with them on assignments. A splash of red always brought a photo together, or at least the viewer's eye to the frame.  

Green lies opposite on the spectrum to red. But green is not the opposite of red. Just as hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is apathy. As such, the opposite of red, is gray. 

My eye is always drawn to the red in a photo, rarely the gray!   

Song in Red and Gray...

It Was All Yellow...

Yellow...

I started taking photographs before I was five. I started taking photographs seriously while I was in my teens. And of course, back then, everything was shot on film.

For every hundred rolls of film I shot, maybe only one was a roll of black and white. Why? A couple of reasons. First of all, I started shooting landscapes because I really thought I wanted to paint rather than photograph. I could shoot a photo, record a landscape, and then paint it.





Mostly though, I absolutely love colour. Its vibrancy, its life, the vividness, the  lushness it conveys.




So forthcoming is a series of essays in colour...

It Was All Yellow...

     

"The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking

- and looking."

Brooks Atkinson, Once Around The Sun.

Patience is a virtue, sometimes it's my only one. So maybe my virtue is enhanced by the time I spend behind the camera.

My patience is found in vemodelan. I no longer feel its frustration. The frustration becomes an impulse to simply capture, to create, to venture toward new rendered images... 

 

Daylilies... Again!

OK, last post with Daylilies for a while. I can't promise I won't shoot any more photos of them this year, but this will be the last posting this year about them!

One block north of us is a quaint little bungalow with a pretty garden. I couldn't resist, the Daylilies were catching the light just so. They were calling out to me to take a few photos.

So this is it. No more Daylily posts... 

For now...

Daylilies and Vemodalen

Daylilies

I have taken hundreds of images of Daylilies, hundreds! Why can't I resist taking them? Will I ever be satisfied with one of them? Or an even better question...




Will I ever be able to capture, and express in an image, the absolute beauty of these flowers? 

I don't think I ever will. It is frustrating, but I'll keep trying. Will I stop if I ever do capture that perfect image? I doubt it.

And until then, I'll keep trying...

Vemodalen...

Vemodalen!

Vemodalen!

What a fantastic word!  

 

The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

This frustration must be felt by many photographers, professional and not so professional! But what seems most frustrating to me, is knowing I have taken that same photo that already exists!

So what can I do?

Take more photos!