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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Butterfly

Posted in from the dark room, photography on July 15, 2008| 1 Comment »

Ever tried taking a photo of a butterfly? I can tell you, it ain’t easy! They just will NOT stay still! Here’s my best attempt so far……

butterfly

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Revealing your passion

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, life, personal growth, photography on July 13, 2008| 4 Comments »

hidden passion

See the passion flower hiding behind these leaves?

This made me think about passion. Passion must be one of the KEY ingredients of a good life I think. What makes a good teacher? Their passion. OK, you need a lot more than passion, but my argument is that those who are passionate about their teaching, passionate about their students’ learning, are the best teachers. What makes a good doctor? Passion. Passionate about his or her patients. Passionate about people, and about healing. Yes, I agree, a doctor needs a lot of knowledge and skill, but without passion for their work, they really aren’t such good doctors.
You could say this about any profession I reckon. If you are a professional and you’re not passionate about what you do, you’re in the wrong profession!
You can also say this about creative people – artists, musicians, writers and so on. Without passion for life, and for their creativity, they just don’t create such great works.
Bland isn’t good.
“Whatever….!” isn’t good.
Long live passion!

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Can you imagine the whole from the pieces?

Posted in from the dark room, health, photography on July 11, 2008| 2 Comments »

de-chandeliered

Can you tell what this is? This table caught my eye as I wandered through the market. The scattering of the pieces on the green surface made it look like a real life version of Monet’s lilies. The sparkle was beautiful and I’d never seen something like this before.

Here’s another view

de-chanderliered

If you haven’t guessed yet, these are the crystals which are used to make chandeliers.

But here’s my question. If you’d never ever seen a chandelier before, could you imagine what one would look like from just looking at these pieces? If someone said to you “make a light from these”, would you know what to do if you hadn’t seen a completed one before? It’s a hard question to answer because we’ve all seen chandeliers before, but my point is that it’s pretty hard to imagine something whole if ALL you have is a view of some of the pieces. Let me push that just one step further. Have you ever experienced a room lit by a chandelier? Because it’s one thing to see a chandelier but it’s quite another to have the experience of a chandelier-lit room.

Here’s a photo of a chandelier I spotted in a shop window (just in case you haven’t actually seen one!)

chandelier

If that principle is correct, how much more difficult is it to imagine a person from an examination of bits of them? How can we know a human being by studying only some blood tests, or X-Rays, or even DNA? It’s not enough to study only the parts. We have to understand the whole. Following my analogy one step further, a healthy human being can only be known by studying the experience of health. Being able to describe a human being is not enough. We have to listen to their stories to understand their experience. That’s true of health and it’s also true of illness.

We are much more than the sum of our parts…….beautiful and amazing as the parts might be!

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Art and Life

Posted in from the dark room, perception, philosophy, photography on July 10, 2008| 1 Comment »

art and life

Art imitating life. You’ve heard that before. Well, this photo doesn’t exactly show the same scene in the painting as I was witnessing across the other side of the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, but it strikes me as close enough to make me wonder…….

How do we see the world? Is it like painting? Do we construct an image of reality in our brains? And if we do, how “real” is that image? In many ways, the brain works a lot more like a painter creating a representation of what he or she sees, than it does like a camera, converting the light rays into a fixed image on film or disc. I like that. I like that the way we perceive the world involves creativity. Day by day, minute by minute, we create the reality we perceive.

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In the clouds

Posted in from the dark room, photography on July 6, 2008| 2 Comments »

clouds

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Creativity, exploration and juxtapositions

Posted in from the dark room, photography on July 6, 2008| 2 Comments »

I took this photo at an open air antique/bric a brac market (one person’s junk is another person’s antiques, they say…….I do remember once seeing a sign in a shop window which said “We buy junk. We sell antiques”!)

bric a brac

This is one of those photos which I find endlessly fascinating. What are all these things? What was held in those bottles? What’s in those little tightly wrapped packages? Who would think to put together a manikin’s head, a pencil case, a crucifix, a hammer and all these containers? Maybe this will stimulate your creativity….let me know if it does.

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You’ve been framed

Posted in from the dark room, photography on July 5, 2008| 1 Comment »

As I wandered along the Cours Mirabeau one weekend recently, one whole side of the street was a bric a brac market. These two frames caught my eye.

framed
reflected

The first one, you’ll see, is an old, gilt, frame, with the tree and the chair showing through the framed space. It caught my eye, and somehow made me think of a gateway into another world. The fact there’s no canvas there turns the picture into an opening.

The second one, at first, looked just like the first. Then I looked more closely and saw it was a very old mirror. Reflecting something behind me. Not reflecting it very clearly though. Because it’s so old, the reflection has become misted and unclear.

Both of these photos stimulate my thoughts about perception. How we focus on only part of what we can see. How we frame part of reality, reducing it to understandable, manageable pieces. And how what lies behind us becomes more dim, less clear, with the passing of the years

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The sun’s rays

Posted in from the dark room, photography on June 26, 2008| 5 Comments »

I looked out the window tonight and saw the sun spreading its rays across the sky and the Earth from behind some clouds. It often looks like this here. It’s beautiful. Every time.

sunrays

Along to the north west a bit, where the rays were not so bright, there were such lovely colours and shades. A real work of art! An inspiration!

textures of land and light

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While the train was waiting…..

Posted in life, music, perception, photography on June 19, 2008| 10 Comments »

The other day as I was on the way home from work, the train stopped in the middle of the countryside. You never quite know why a train stops somewhere between stations but you can be sure it means the train is delayed. A long time ago I realised that wearing a watch increased my sense of anxiety because I’d sit on a train which was just quietly doing nothing and I’d keep checking my watch to see just how much more delayed we were and figuring how much later I’d arrive than planned. I realised that I had absolutely zero control over the train’s movements and looking at my watch every couple of minutes wasn’t going to get me to my destination any faster. Taking the watch off let me look at other things instead – a book, a paper, a notebook, hey, even the outside world!

So as we sat doing nothing much I looked out the window and something caught my eye.

blackbird

No, not the buildings in the distance, but that blackbird sitting on the bush. I zoomed in to get a closer look.

blackbird

Look at him singing away! I couldn’t hear him from inside the train but a song immediately came into my head

I enjoyed the moment.

Here’s my suggestion for today. If you find yourself unexpectedly held up or delayed take a wee look around and see what you can see (or hear, or smell, or feel). What comes to your mind?

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Asparagus

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on June 10, 2008| 4 Comments »

asparagus

One day at the local market in Aix I saw this stall. Have you ever seen this much asparagus for sale? There’s a whole wall of it here!

I think asparagus is really tasty, but I don’t remember ever tasting it as a child. Do you have any foodstuffs which you didn’t taste until you became an adult but which you discovered you really enjoyed?

I decided to check out wikipedia and see what I could find out about asparagus before I posted this photo. I was interested to read that it has certain medicinal properties – not least that it can bring on an attack of gout, but that it’s been a traditional medicine for the treatment of urinary tract infections and stones.

There was one surprising fact I discovered though – it’s about the way asparagus consumption changes the smell of your urine! Apparently Marcel Proust commented on this claiming that asparagus “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.” It’s something I’ve been very aware of since I first ate asparagus, but the one thing I didn’t know was that only 40% of the population have the genes needed to be able to smell it! This may be something peculiar about the way my mind works but that fact suddenly made me think of the old zen puzzle – does a tree falling in the forest, where nobody is present, make a noise?

Isn’t it interesting that a smell might only exist if the person doing the smelling has a certain gene? Oh, and what on earth are we doing with a gene for smelling the metabolites of asparagus in the urine?

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