With the new month comes a new postcard. Leaves always fascinate me. Not in their collective but in their individuality (a collection of portraits of leaves is in my recent 52/4 journal). This one caught my eye. Let me know if you want to get a postcard of it.
A warm fall deprived us the season’s flaming reds, oranges, and yellows. Most leaves just turned brown and fell to the ground. The frost this morning seemed to be mocking me.
I just sent the files of the latest issue of 52 to the local printer, Fireball Printing. This issue is a collection of photos of leaves, usually just a single leaf though a few pairs of leaves. They reflect quiet fall moments before a breeze or a car disturbs them.
The printed photograph encourages a different, lingering engagement with the image, and allows for sequencing and order that digital photos discourage. There is no scrolling, no share-on-social-media button (no buttons at all, in fact), no likes. Just a series of photographs. Perfect for a cup of coffee, a pastry, and enjoy.
If you would like me to send you a copy, let me know: darin@drhayton.com. You can also download pdf copies from 52.
A chance to spend another hour or so at Ashford Farms, a local stable, gave me the chance to take some more photos of the horses. Many of the horses were in their stables, so I tried to make the best of the strong lighting contrast. Silhouettes seemed like a good way to go. A few turned out ok. Here’s one:
Photographic rules and guidelines are everywhere: golden spiral, golden triangles, avoid placing a subject dead center, center the dominate eye, don’t divide the frame in half, strive for symmetry, avoid symmetry, create dynamic symmetry, in portraits don’t crop limbs, in headshots you need not include the top of the person’s head, steady the camera so as to avoid shake, try to create intentional camera movement, be sure to straighten the horizon, use leading lines. And, of course, everybody’s favorite: the rule of thirds.
For the most part, these seem less prescriptive rules or guidelines and more a post-hoc description of the composition of a photograph. Sure, some of these rules might be at play now and then when taking a photograph (leading lines? a very rough rule of thirds? symmetry?), but most seem to be applied by people looking at photographs. In this way, these rules seem as pointless as grades on classwork in school. They are used to justify liking or disliking a photograph and serve little purpose in helping a photographer improve (much like a teacher or professor giving a paper an “A” or a “C”).
I happen to like dividing the scene into broad areas, generally three (some rule-bound person would probably equate these areas with the foreground, mid-ground, and background, but I don’t care). The relationship between these areas is often marked by contrasts in color and texture. This division of the scene into three areas is not a rule, was probably (at least initially) a subconscious aesthetic preference, but now after seeing it in a number of my photographs has become quasi-intentional (or so I tell myself).
How many rules are little more than efforts to standardize and thereby authorize practices that were initially derided but have become so common that they are unavoidable? Far from establishing the practices that should be common, these “rules” try to appropriate, codify, and legitimize vernacular practices. Kim Beil’s excellent book, Good Pictures, traces some of the practices that became markers of good photography and then fell out of fashion, and some that zombie-like returned. Her interview at B&H Photo, “Speaking in Dialect – How-to Books and the History of Popular Photography,” is also worth a listen.
Standing here looking west, it’s easy to lose yourself in thick forest of trees. There is no path leading forward. No obvious way to the far side, if indeed there is a far side. Although the sun shines somewhere overhead, here under the canopy of branches and leaves a diffuse light seems to permeate the scene. I pause for a moment to enjoy the solitude and to imagine I’m on the edge of some vast unknown.
Then the pneumatic hammer begins pounding, so close it startles me. I am not, alas, in the middle of some ancient forest but a scant few feet from a construction project. Men running jack hammers and excavating the existing parking lot presumably to replace it with a new one. I turn around and watch the workmen for a few minutes, lament the intrusion of civilization, and then head down the nature trail toward my office where, if I’m lucky, it will be quieter.
Detritus (noun): waste or debris of any kind. Cf., discarded matter, refuse, litter, flotsam & jetsam, dross, chaff. Maybe sediment (noun): matter that settles to the bottom (usually of a liquid). Cf., dregs, lees, residue, alluvium. The difference, to me, is we can’t help but produce sediment. Just our being generates a trail of sediment everywhere we go. Detritus, however, is often a willful act of discarding, throwing off that which we no longer want. Cigarette butts are surely detritus.
On a recent Saturday at the local stables I dawdled around taking photos of the horses. They were so cooperative, extending their heads and looking right at me.
It was a lovely day, and a pleasant way to spend a few minutes. I have no idea if the horses cared, they didn’t say one way or another. But I had fun and came away with a handful of striking portaits.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month I was inspired by the detritus I found on a local walk and recollections of Penn’s portraits of cigarettes. Let me know if you want to receive a postcard.
A selection of cigarette butts from a local “nature trail.” I look forward to a day when the cigarette butt goes the way of the pulltab.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month I imagined I was in a city that had lovely sidewalk cafes and a rich pedestrian culture. One can dream. Let me know if you want me to send you a postcard.
The chair beckons, encouraging me to linger for a moment. Nobody is around. Perhaps I will.
On the beach that morning a couple walked through the water, a group of young people splayed out across the blankets where they had spent the night, and a handful of fishermen were baiting hooks and casting. The sun would come up in about 10 minutes. I scanned the horizon for the beautiful morning scene to capture with my camera. Soon that bright orange ball of fire would float slowing higher in the sky casting its warm light across the sea foam and the glistening sand. Sand.
In the sand were the most amazing patterns that reminded me of herringbone cloth and patterned fabrics from the early 20th century.
For the next hour or so I wandered the beach just looking for patterns in the sand. Triangles and diamonds played out across the wet sand. No doubt somebody could tell me how these patters are formed, but I don’t need to know. Just watching them shift and change in subtle ways was enough for me.
I lost myself that morning in those patterns. The sunrise was, I am sure, lovely. The national bird sanctuary? No doubt filled with birds. At some point the young people picked up their stuff and headed home, as did the fishermen with tales of the big one that got away. I left with images, photographic and mental, of the sand.