Thistle Fantasy

Thistle Fantasy

Thistle Fantasy is hot off the press. I photographed it yesterday (09.16.2022) afternoon as I was driving down a dirt road close to home. To be honest, yesterday I was “focused” (pun acknowledged) on the sky. The late afternoon sky, especially in the east, was a beautiful, deep blue and filled with perfect white clouds. The ditches had just been mowed and I came across a long strip of Canada Thistles that were going to seed. The mower had taken out most of the patch, but left a row of thistles still standing. I’m still enough of a farm boy to have my “weed” alarm go off when I see thistles and I’m not inclined to see them as something to photograph. BUT, I’ve learned that creativity can grow out of moments where one pauses after one’s initial reaction and takes another, deeper look.

One little photographic rule I made up is “move back, move close”. Sometimes I’ll see something interesting but won’t be able to make it work visually. This is where “move back, move close” comes into play. Physically moving back or switching to a wide-angle lens changes the perspective and shows the subject in context. This view combines the interesting visuals of the subject with the story of its interaction with the world around it. Some of the photographs in my Lonely Tree Gallery follow this rule, showing lonely trees in their prairie context. When moving back does'’t work, I move close, sometimes really close. I’ve learned that I can find new visual worlds when I move into the macro world record seldom-noticed shapes, colours, and textures. I followed the “move close” rule for many of the photos in my Monochrome Flowers Gallery, where I explored macro shapes and textures of flowers. The “move close” rule helped me to find the world of exploding Canada Thistle seeds represented in Thistle Fantasy.

Nikon D750 @ ISO 100, Nikkor 105 f/2.8 Macro

Hope

Hope Stone

Hope, while never perfectly clear at first, emerges and brings us new life.

Monochrome Flowers

We love the rich and varied colours that flowers offer the visual world. I do too - take a look at my Backyard Flowers Gallery to see some of my colour photographs of flowers. Today, we’re so used to seeing colour photographs that we view black and white, or monochrome, pictures as “missing something” or as colour photography’s poor, boring cousin. I’d like to challenge that perception with my Monochrome Flowers collection.

Colour has such a powerful visual impact that we often stop seeing after we’ve processed the colours in a photograph. Monochrome photography invites the viewer to put aside the dominance of colour and look deeper in to the scene. Good monochrome images emphasize the forms, shapes, and textures in the visual world. I hope that this series of monochrome flower photographs enables you to appreciate the rich forms and textures that they have to offer.