I actually laughed when I saw this plant. The big polka dots and the outrageous red backside of these leaves are just ridiculously over-the-top. It really looks like a children’s book idea of a tropical plant. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the straight photographic version, I felt that simplifying and making it more abstract…
Tag Archive: abstract
Buried Fist
In the version of T’ai Chi I’m studying, there’s a posture in the final third, not far from the end, called “Step Forward to Seven Stars” (why, I have no idea). In any case, it involves winding up with your forearms crossed in front of you, your hands held as fists and the “eyes” of…
Camera Choice
I was hanging out on Abbie and Denis’s back porch when I spotted this somewhat collapsed mobile in the late afternoon light. After the annoyance with the airplane photo, I wanted to make sure I at least documented it for myself, so I whipped out the iPhone and made the photo above, which I think…
Thorny
This is a close-up of the maze-like branches of a bitter-orange tree, a plant that seems to have been translated wholesale from the parallel world of fairy tales and fables. Everything about it is fraught with metaphor and symbolism. It also has a thoroughly fractal growth pattern. A Year Ago: Mango & Sticky Rice This…
Bird of Paradise
Does it matter that the nectar funnel is two blue petals fused together? The intense color and sheer abstraction are what make this photograph work for me. It’s the flower version of a sunset. A Year Ago: Paper Parasols It’s raining umbrellas at Sticky Rice in DC… [read more]
Fenced In
If yesterday’s photograph looked like an old-fashioned cyanotype, today’s has a vaguely solarized look. It was taken with my iPhone, and then put through the wringer in Aperture, as I was unable to get the colors to look the way I remembered them. In the end, I wound up heavily desaturating the image so that…
Encrusted
Because I am an aesthetic snob, raised by aesthetic snobs (they would have never copped to that: they would have insisted that they were merely well-educated people with good taste), I approach software like Instagram with knee-jerk disdain. People take their crappy snapshots, bleach, punch ‘em up, smudge ‘em, throw a grundge frame around them…
Linear
In the north, winter is the season of monochrome. A Year Ago: Dried Buds This photograph was shot in blustery wind… [read more]
Bound
I’ve got to admit, the leeetle eettie beettie camera lens in the iPhone 4S is making reasonable-quality images (no doubt with some in-phone software processing to help). This pair of pictures is from my visit to Annapolis, and while I’m sure that my GF1 could have supplied an extra margin of detail and tonal range…
Spine
A Year Ago: Ice Tree Winter can’t last forever, can it? [read more]