Autumn Rose

I just like this photo. We were walking around the neighborhood a couple of nights ago just before sunset, so I grabbed the camera with the 50 /1.8 attached, just in case. Also gave me an excuse to work on learning how to use Photoshop CS5. So here it is -- on my least favorite holiday of them all. A rose for Halloween.

Taking Pictures and Creating Art

Once upon a
time, when I began sharing my photos on Flickr I wrote these words on my profile page:

I believe that art is a magnet for emotion. The greater the emotional response to a work or art - be it music, sculpture, video and cinema, still photography, painting, drawing, or any other media, or the natural or artificial spacial environment - the purer the art. The purer the art, the closer it gets to truth.

Since the crash of my backup drive last week and the loss of some 2,000 images forever I've found myself contemplating the difference between taking pictures and making art. Is what I lost (and indeed what I have), art? Adding to my philosophical dilemma is the completion of renovations to our home last week that created a significant amount of empty wall space -- space begging for the correct "filler". So given the style of the room and the mood I wanted to capture I have also been thinking about what should go up on those walls. I want it to be artful. And I want it to be born through my camera lens. But I wonder: Will it be art?

What I do believe, as I wrote a couple of years ago, is that Art is an emotional trigger. It's a way of honing in on Truth. Exposing the deepest reality. In my secular disposition, I suppose it edges on personal spirituality. To get there, I think, the artist has to do more than simply create something pleasing -- to the eye or to the ear (or to the palate for that matter). What you create has to be something you believe in -- something you are connected to. Something you love. An artist has to make the observer see through his eyes, hear through her ears, feel with his hands, love what she loves. I'm not at all sure that I'm there yet. Might never be. But it's a pretty good goal in life, don't you think?

Spring - North Florida

A brief note while I have a few minutes. These days it seems the time just slips by while I either head in one of 17 different directions or just spin in circles. You'd think by this point in one's life it would be time to slow down a bit -- not speed up. But the RPMs keep increasing...

At any rate, I did manage to slow down enough last week to shoot this in the backyard...
This Magnolia Grandiflora blossom is from a tree that I planted at the rear of our property in 1990. It was the last remaining crooked little sapling at a parking lot flowering tree sale. Like Charley Brown's crummy little Christmas tree, no one else cared to take this one home -- scrawny and shaped like a J. We've watched  her grow for 18 years now -- to a height of well over 40 feet. Her gifts back to us are the annual celebrations of late spring's transition to more summer-like warmth. She still angles out of the ground at about 20 degrees, then heads strait for the sky -- the disability of her youth now an attactive platform to be climbed by my grandson. Just goes to show you -- you never know.

The image below is a small blossom in my sister-in-law's side yard in Winter Park, Florida, near Orlando. No idea what it is -- but it sure is pretty.
Welcome to spring... With Memorial Day weekend just a few days away, the heat of the Florida summer is about to be upon us.