Tag: macro

The faces in the store

So on a recent trip to Vermont I actually found a way to entertain myself at a local antique shop. Usually, when I’m dragged to these types of shops, I wander around, staring at the ceiling, hoping my wife or family doesn’t take too long. I just don’t have the antique bug. I take nothing away from people who love antiquing, but it bores the hell out of me.

So at this recent visit I started checking out the various plastic dolls and statuettes, specifically their faces. And the more I did that the more they started to seem almost alive, with sad, happy, lost, and even demented expressions.

I decided to take as many photos of these faces as I could. I must have looked strange to the store’s staff, me some weirdo taking photos of little dolls and wooden statues, not buying anything, just snapping away.

The set came out great. And the more I look at them the more human they seem.

You tell me.

Enjoy the photos. I think I’ll take more of these.

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Publish date:
January 19th, 2010
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TV break, through the kaleidoscope

If you thought watching television through a kaleidoscope would give you a headache, you’d probably be right. However, it just might put this parade of mind-numbing entertainment in perspective.

On my recent trip to Minneapolis, I was surprised that in addition to the squat tubes of soaps and lotions, a ubiquitous white robe and an overpriced minibar, there was a small kaleidoscope in the room, perhaps there to help adulterous trysters pass the time while they wait for their pot brownies to wear off. Because having looked through it at the gray and cold landscape of the frost-bitten city, there’s no way it was meant for enhancing the drab skyline.

But watching television through it? It was early, and I was passing time before having to head out to full day of corporate meetings, so I turned on CNN and watched a fluff-filled newscast spin and flash in dissecting, blooming, bleeding and flashing patterns of light crystals.

Suddenly, it all made sense, the repetition, the hypnotic glare, the cells flowing into one another.

It may sound like an overstatement, but I found the mask slipped away when I watched TV through a kaleidoscope. My mask, their masks, all of it. It’s not real, the box, it’s a snowflake melting on your eye, keeping it wet so you don’t have to blink.

I put the kaleidoscope up to my camera, and took a few pics so you can see what I’m talking about. The patterns are beautiful, eerie, gruesome, hypnotic and delicate, like the experience.

Enjoy the photos.

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Publish date:
December 28th, 2009
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Stuck in the middle of fall

DSC00597So here’s the next batch of fall photos I’ve taken this season, which, on the Northeast has been generally mild. For that, I am not complaining. Anything that keeps the cold away.

This group comes from the middle period of the season, when the leaves left on the trees were bright yellow and red and the leaves that had already fallen had not yet dried and turned brown.

It was during that time that my daughter had her first Halloween. Also, I got to pick my own cabernet franc grapes in the North Fork of Long Island for wine that I’m helping to make.

As I’ve said, most of the trees on my property turn yellow, so the whole yard shone gold in the middle of fall. It’s been beautiful.

Enjoy the photos.

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Publish date:
November 24th, 2009
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Sights of early fall

IMG_2463While I have held back on the photo posts recently, trying to get more writing done than photo taking, I have plenty of photos I’ve taken this fall that I’d love to share.

So here’s the first batch, taken right when the leaves started to fall off of the trees. These are a lot of the same tress and bushes I photographed in the summer, like the hosta, which has lost its flowers and turned yellow, and the hydrangeas that have left behind brown, dried shells of flowers.

Of course, it’s the up close colors and patterns of the leaves that inspire me the most.

Enjoy the photos. And, as always, you’re welcome to download any of them you would like. I’m not good enough a photographer to be stingy with my pics.

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Publish date:
November 10th, 2009
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Up close and abstract

IMG_2003I’ve been holding on to these photos.

Back in the summer, one rainy day I noticed as I was walking my dogs that the wood grain in the Adirondack chairs on my back patio looked like fish scales. And while when they were dry the chairs were gray, when wet the green moss in the cracks and hidden brown in the wood stood out.

I also took a few photos of a wet sawhorse I had used a few times to hold bed frames as I spray painted them white. With the wet grain and speckles of white paint, the texture in the photos was wonderful. I also photographed one of the rusty wing nuts holding the sawhorse together.

I do love to snap pictures of patterns, and love it when the results look almost like an abstract painting.

These were a batch of really good ones.

Enjoy.

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Publish date:
November 3rd, 2009
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Rained on in the recycling bin

IMG_1995Here are another batch of photos from my obsession with macro, though I’d argue these might be some of the best non-flower, non-nature ones I’ve ever taken.

It was late in the summer when during a wonderful, warm rain – which I miss terribly now as rain in the fall in winter only means miserable, bone-chilling cold – that I took  a few photographs of the plastic bottles and aluminum cans stuffed into my recycling bin.

When I first looked at the photos on the computer they were average and  little dull, but I found putting them through some basic image enhancements in Photoshop brought out the muted colors reflected in the bottles.

It gives the shots an almost painted effect.

Enjoy:

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Publish date:
October 30th, 2009
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And with this I say ‘goodbye summer’

These are last of my summer flower pics, and though I can’t say they are the best ones I took, I can say the actual moment when I took them was one of the best of the summer.

I credit the wind.

It was a warm summer day, late afternoon, and I had walked outside of my in-law’s house because I had noticed a set of flowers I hadn’t photographed yet, a bush full of flowing purple hibiscus.

Then, when I started taking photos a warm wind kicked up, ruffling the petals of the flower like cotton sheets hanging on a clothesline. It was so quiet outside that i could hear the wind scrubbing my hair. And though the air coursed around me like rapids split by a river boulder, it felt like I too was bending in the wind with the tissue-paper petals.

The joys of the moment. A still joy. A peaceful joy. A summer joy.

I’ll miss it, but the season will return. Now it’s time to dig into fall.

Enjoy the photos.

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Publish date:
October 16th, 2009
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Is this jasmine or not?

A little help here would be appreciated.

Judging by the smell of the following vine I’ve photographed, which climbs up the corner of my house, this is some kind of jasmine. It’s a pretty unmistakable fragrance.

However, though a few Internet searches have led me to believe this is some kind of star jasmine, there is one difference I just can’t overlook. Star jasmine flowers have five petals, while the one I photographed only has four.

In fact, I can’t find any four-petal jasmine flowers online. But, trust me, these little white flowers smell like jasmine.

So, if you happen to be, or know, a flower expert, I could use your help.

What is this?

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Publish date:
October 16th, 2009
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