from the dark room | Heroes Not Zombies

Archive for the ‘from the dark room’ Category

Attracting attention

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »

This is certainly one way to catch someone’s attention! You’d be surprised to know how many plants use hooks and spikes to catch on to passers by…..or maybe you wouldn’t, if like me you walked through an area like this wearing sandals!

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What do you see?

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

What do you see here? Can you explain what it is you’re seeing?

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The king of the vespas

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Who’d have thought the King would prefer a pink vespa?
I like it. Isn’t it great when we see a juxtaposition of contexts which makes us think of each of the elements differently?

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Man at work

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 28, 2010| Leave a Comment »

11am, Saturday, third floor, new residences, just past the Rotonde, Aix en Provence

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looking at leaves

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on August 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I love the sight of sunlight through leaves.

Look at these three photos. I think they illustrate a really important lesson for all of us. They illustrate the paradox of difference and sameness. If you’re a botanist, you might look at these three photos and seek to classify them as three different trees. What “families” do they belong to? What are their “names”? But if you just look, you’ll see that whilst each tree has its own characteristics, each leaf is different.

We’re all different too. I think that’s something to celebrate. I despair at the kind of thinking which stops at the level of classification into types, diagnoses, statistics. We need to be able to think beyond that, to see beyond that, to be curious about, fascinated by difference, and to love uniqueness.

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national identity

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on August 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

What makes up our sense of a national identity? How about you? Do you have a national identity that means a lot to you? If not, what are the threads of identity which run through you?

And here’s another thing, can you get in touch with the feeling that people from other nations than your own are people you’d like to get to know and build links with? I hope so. I hope differences are exciting and interesting to you. I hope you enjoy feeling changed by your encounters with the Other.

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Life force

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 25, 2010| 1 Comment »

I love the sight of the sun shining through a plant.
It not only catches my eye, but it fills me with wonder about how plants capture the energy of the sun, just by sitting there basking in it. We can’t do that! But it also makes me think metaphorically about the life force that shines in all of us. Wonderful.

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Butterfly meditation

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, tagged meditation on August 24, 2010| 1 Comment »

Ah, yes, meditation might be thought of as a way of “stilling the mind”, or “calming the crazy mind”, but there’s something totally absorbing, focused and calming in the activity of photographing butterflies. You need patience. Lots of it. And you need to be able to let go of the need to control and predict. You have absolutely no way to know how long a particular butterfly will rest on a particular flower, if or when it will open its wings, and which direction it’s going to fly off in next.

Here’s some I spent a LONG time capturing!

Try it for yourself sometime. It’s very therapeutic. Slows you right down…..

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Maybe its just me, but….

Posted in from the dark room, photography on August 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

doesn’t this freshly cut plum sitting in front of a warm baguette…

….remind you a bit of this sculpture by Mitoraj?

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More Mitoraj in Aix

Posted in art, from the dark room, photography on August 22, 2010| 1 Comment »

I posted earlier about the Mitoraj sculptures installed around Aix en Provence. I’m back in town just now and just stumbled across a couple more I missed first time…