Embracing the Bones...

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

~Andrew Wyeth

  

   This may just be my Winter Etching for 2015.  It is a branch from my trumpet vine that somehow escaped being tied up this past fall.  I love the simple and elegant calligraphic quality of it.

   Andrew Wyeth understood the bleak beauty of winter and many of his paintings hinted at the Chinese aesthetic of large areas of "empty" space.  Of course, it is far from empty but it does give the eye a place to rest.

    The Chinese were also the masters of the single gestural stoke.  They said so much with so little.  This photograph may not be an etching exactly but it has that radical simplicity that I love so much in Chinese brush painting so I might just bend the rules a bit.

   Winter in Maine is the perfect time to embrace the bones of the landscape.  This stark simplicity will not be here come spring when a whole new aesthetic will be present.  Time to celebrate this season of whiteness...

"I'd Like to Hand it to You!"

   I love photographing hands...hands at work, hands at rest.  Hands reveal so much.  This is a hand project that has been rumbling around in my head for awhile.

   If you could hand someone a special gift, something that you feel is essential for their happiness and well being, what would it be?  Well, here is my gift to you for 2015...

 I give you the gift of

 a seeking heart.

   This is, as some of you may recognize, my scallop shell container which holds my pilgrim tokens.  I bought it a few years ago in France and it goes everywhere with me now.  It symbolizes that "seeking heart" to me.  Pilgrims of any stripe are seekers and the journey needn't be to faraway places.  Seekers are those who are always looking, always open to the new and the serendipitous.  Seekers may grow old in body but never in spirit...they are life long learners on every level that matters.

   Now, what would you give to others if you could?  How would you symbolically represent it?  If any of you wish to share your gift with those on this blog, please send me a photograph of your hand holding the "gift".  Send it to Upcloseandfaraway@hotmail.com.  I would love to see what your gift would be! 

Exploring the Edge...

   Borderlands are especially important in Celtic Spirituality.  The place where two ways of being touch are deemed sacred.  Edges, between light and shadow, water and land, sand and grass, are all around us everyday.  This one was just 50 feet from my back door.

   The winter landscape allows these borderlands to be especially vivid.  Their elegant simplicity can be striking.  There is a decided zen feeling to this one I thought.  Minimalism personified.

   It was the twig, frozen in the snow that was particularly appealing for me.  Blown off in the recent high winds, the tiny bud ends will never spring into life now...their potential gone.  Yet the reflected light in the deep shadows speaks of hope and renewal.  Beneath this blue and white quilt of frozen snow are all the bulbs I planted in the autumn.  They are there...waiting.  This reminds me of a Rumi quote...

Don't think the garden loses its ecstasy

in winter.  It's quiet, but the roots are

down there riotous.

   Here is a link to another post I did last year on borderlands....

Dig Deeper:

And I recommend Esther d Waal's wonderful little (and it is indeed tiny!) book, To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border.  I took it on my Threshold Pilgrimage last year and it is a valuable study of these border places.  You might also like to re-read my posts from my trip to Ireland and Scotland here.  You will have to go to "Older Posts" after the first few...there are 30 posts in total!  Pour yourself a cup of tea!

"A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words..."

   In her wonderful blog, 365 Days of Inspiration, Kim Manley Ort wrote about the 1K Photographic Blogging Challenge.  Can you prove the old adage true and write 1000 words about one photograph?  You are not allowed to talk about "technical issues", only your personal response to the image itself.

   This is a lot easier said than done!  150, even 200 words...no problem but 1000 words...that's a lot of words!  I love to write but even I find this quite a daunting undertaking.  But the challenge is really about finding out how deeply you can immerse yourself in one image. My word for the year again!

   In the weeks ahead, I will try the challenge with a photograph I made recently.  I began with what is probably the antithesis of the 1K word challenge, a haiku...

Frozen stillness, blue

Serenity etched on ice

Solitude revealed

   As soon as I wrote the haiku I realized that it included my three favorite words...stillness, serenity and solitude!  Perhaps I could write 991 more words about this photograph after all!  What about you?  Are you up to a January photographic challenge?  Pick a recent photograph and sit with it...let the words flow...immerse yourself in the visual world you felt worthy of photographing.  It might be very revealing.

   

Gathering Breadcrumbs at the Museum...

   When I first entered the Harvard Art Museums lobby, I was transfixed by the stairwell and spent quite a bit of time photographing the shadows.  I find that when something enters my consciousness as strongly as this did, it stays with me for a long time.

   This was certainly the case at the museum.  As we walked through the galleries breathing in the beautiful art, my eye would wander to the shadows created by the sculptures.  The reflections and simplicity of this Chinese vase was one of the breadcrumbs I picked up.

   As I gathered them, I reflected on the illusion of shadows that describe but do no define what they are a shadow of.  It is all illusion and changes as the light does.  But I love the soft light and varying tones of the multiple shadows and thought I would share a couple of them with you.

    Shadow patterns are a wonderful contemplative possibility.  In the museum, with all its directional lighting, they were quite intricate in some cases.

   Luckily, the museum encouraged non-flash photography so I was not at a loss for inspiration.  For more shadow inspiration, visit the following link:

Beautiful Shadows

Looking Up and Looking Down...

   On my recent trip into Cambridge, I felt like such a tourist!  I'd lived in the city for 2 years after I graduated from Harvard but this day, it all seemed new to me.

   Walking between the museums gave me lots of contemplative possibilities but I settled on the juxtaposition of the orderly and random.

   Cities, by their very nature, are man's attempt to bring order and structure to the world.  The beautiful tower of Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus is covered with intricate geometric patterns and is a masterpiece of symmetry and balance. A perfect example of the rational mind.  Yet, when viewed against the random and shape-shifting clouds, it takes on a different meaning for me...it is a dialogue between the rational and the mystical mind.

    There are those who maintain that if you can't categorize it, measure it, label it, and prove it scientifically, then it doesn't exist.  They discount all else.  The mystical world is just so much nonsense.  Of course, they are entitled to their opinions but for me there is something more at play in the world.  Call it what you will, but there is a knowing beyond knowing and it can't be categorized, measured, labeled or proved.

   When you look up, you look out into that world.  When you look down, you look into your own world.  I found that analogy beautifully and simply illustrated at my feet.  The curved and random seed pods laying on the ordered, logical brick pattern...two distinct worlds - and world views - which are interconnected yet separate.  Some minds, fortunately, can accommodate both viewpoints.

The most beautiful thing we can experience 

is the mysterious.

 It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein 

  

Seeing the Unseen...

       

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion

to the clarity of their hearts.

- Rumi

   I am asked countless times, "How do you see what you see?"  After all, we all have the same eyes, we can stand on the same spot in the landscape and yet, we all see things differently.  I've thought a great deal about this idea, the idea of perspective, because it all comes down to that in the end.

   We are confronted everyday with an overwhelming and, at times, over loaded range of visual imagery.  When you go out with your camera you have literally millions of choices.  Why do some people "see", or choose to frame, certain parts and not others?  Rumi suggests it is a "heart thing".

   I also see it as a "why thing"...why are you making the photograph in the first place?  Is it merely to record a place and time...freezing it for you to savor later on?   Or are your responding to the whispers of the landscape?  Is seeing more a function of hearing?  That is the basis of all my visual listening exercises.

   Perspective is also dependent on circumstance.  What is happening "out there" effects what can go on "in here".  Mood shapes perspective in sometimes alarming ways.  

...what we see is what we are.

-Ernst Haas

   So I suppose we come back to the Rumi quotation I began with.  What I see, my ability to see the unseen, is totally dependent on who I am at that moment in time.  Tomorrow I will see something totally different and that is a wonderful thing.  That's why I can go back day after day to the pond, even stand in the exact same place, and see a whole different reality.  That is the essence of seeing for me, to bring new eyes and an open and receptive heart to the experience each time...

Choices...

We are our choices.

- J.P. Sartre

   I have been making, for me, a lot of astounding choices recently.  The pond has not only inspired me to go abstract but I am seriously beginning to think of some of my photographs in more painterly ways in the  processing of them.

   Now, I'm not sure what that says about me.  I've never been interested in the abstract photograph before but the experience at the pond is pushing me into places I never thought I'd go.

   I'm not going to spend too much time dwelling on it however.  I have just embraced it and I'll see where it leads me.  What choices have you been making lately with your camera work?  If you lined up the last dozen photographs that you have made, can you see the choices you've made clearly?  Is there a pattern to those choices?

   I suspect that we go in cycles...like my fascination last winter for photographing only what I could see out of my windows.  Whatever drives the photographic choices we make, remember, it is all about choices and the choices we make determines the photographs we make.  And the photographs we make say a lot about who we are.

White on White

   With the first snowfall comes not only beauty but photographic possibilities.  Photographing snow is not easy, well, at least I don't find it so.  If it is too bright it burns out, too dark and it turns blue but it's worth the effort.

   It made me think of the possibility of photographing only white things, not just snow.  There are so many variations of what we lump into the category of "white".  Infinite forms of whiteness. 

   A photographer spent some time photographing the Harvard campus and focused only on "the lighter side", creating a series of neutral toned images.  You can see the series here. Although not completely white, the series does show the possibility of the limited palette in photography.

   I often do what I call "Etchings" during the winter, when I photograph the delicate shadows on the snow.   And of course, there is the fantasy world of frost on windows.

   These two images were originally photographed in color and then converted to black and white.  The challenge now, however, would be to photograph white things in color.  You would have to be a lot more selective and discriminating in your subject selection and more careful in the way you handle the image in Photoshop.

   Finding ways to challenge your camera work by photographing white subjects is simply an exercise in honing your eye...becoming more attuned to subtle nuances of tone and light.  And you don't have to live in snowy New England!  Consider spending a day just looking for white on white composition possibilities.  Might be an interesting way to spend a day.  Hmm...looks like my ink is fading into whiteness.....


   

Contemplative Possibilities - Hands

   I love photographing hands at work.  This photograph is one of my favorites; it is from the First Person Rural series I complete a few years back.  I even have a board on Pinterest devoted entirely to photographic renderings of hands...you can see it here.  

 
   One of my favorite memories of childhood is sitting watching my Grandmother knit.  The soft click, click, click was hypnotizing.  I was always mesmerized by the way the knitted piece grew under her needles, as if by magic I thought.

   I am enthralled by people who can create beautiful objects.  Finely crafted items of cloth or wood or clay.  We live in such a mass produced, machine made culture that the work of the hand becomes even more precious.

  The link below leads you an incredible video which shows ceramic masters at work shaping clay vessels.  It is an awe inspiring glimpse at the work of masterful practitioners of the art of pottery.  It may inspire you to begin your own series on hands or maybe just give you a new appreciation of those who use their hands to create everyday...including yourself!

Extensions of the Heart, Instruments of the Soul

 

Keys to the Past: The contemplative possibilites in objects

   I was rummaging around in a cupboard in my studio recently and came across an old steel box filled with my Grandfather's collection of keys.  He never threw one out!

  Back in the day, if you lost a key, you could often substitute another to open the lock, especially the old ones that used what they called "skeleton" keys.  I never had a key to my childhood home...didn't need one, the door was never locked!

   I smiled at the old lock with the word "stability" stamped on it.  After visiting the monastery in September, it made me think of the monks who take a vow of stability...staying in one place.  We, today, are not a very stable culture.  People move, on the average, every seven years.  I've put the heavy old lock on my end table where I sit and write each morning as a reminder of the need for some form of stability in our lives...how important it is for a peaceful soul.

   Some of the keys had paper tags which I found interesting.  This one must have been to a safe deposit box at the bank.  I wonder why it wasn't returned?  Keys, and the things they open, have all sorts of metaphorical possibilities.  And, as a dyed in the wool story teller, I could imagine a whole world this key represents.


  This mysterious one is for Room 14 on the 4th floor.  Who lived there?  My imagination was going at full tilt at this point.

    This final key interested me the most.  What did "Mother" keep in her small tin box?  Whose Mother was she?  My Grandfather's?  His Father's?  What did she have that was so precious that she needed to lock it away from prying eyes.  Was it what my Grandfather called "pin money"...the nickles and dimes that came from some little enterprise, like selling eggs, that would be used to buy the expensive steel pins she needed for her sewing projects?  Or was she saving for something special, something she wanted to keep secret?  A new hat perhaps?

   We all keep things locked away inside our heart's closet.  We guard the key diligently.  Somethings will never see the light of day...maybe that's a good thing in some cases.  These keys were all important to someone at one time.  They, and the secrets they protected, however, are long gone.  All that is left are the keys, the artifacts of a distant past, and we are left with much to wonder at.  I think I will mount some of these keys in a shadow box for future generations to puzzle over.  Like my Grandfather, I can't bear to throw them away!

In Their Own Words: John O'Donohue

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.

 - John O’Donohue

The Poetry of Place: 3 October 2014

   "The quality of our looking...." what a thought provoking phrase.  What determines the quality of our looking?  I tried to come up with a formula:

Q = a clear mind + an open heart + sufficient time - expectations

  This equation simplifies things quite a bit but it gets to the essence of the contemplative photographic experience for me.  There is no better illustration of this than the pond abstractions I'm discovering.

   I  had no idea, when I first experienced one, that I would so completely fall in love with the idea.  The abstract expressionist renderings in the water were a revelation for me.  It allowed me to see Nature as the ultimate artist creating masterful canvases for me to enjoy.

   I've even taken the idea one step further and added a painterly effect to the image; subtle brush strokes.  I can see these printed large, on canvas.  This is something I would never have attempted just a few months ago.  The pond experience is opening all sorts of new paths for me to explore.  Perhaps I should add "+ an open mind" to my equation!

   Soon, too soon for my tastes, the pond will be blanketed in white and the abstract compositions in the water will end for a time.   But that just opens up new possibilities to explore if I just keep my contemplative equation in my mind.  My experience at the pond this year will certainly be enhanced if I also keep John's words in mind..."when our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us."  There can be no better advise in my opinion.

 

Weekend Retreat at St. Joseph's Abbey...

   I leave for the St. Joseph Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts today.  It is my first monastic retreat since staying at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky last year.  (You can read about that experience here...)

   My friends often wonder about my fascination for monastic retreats.  Being raised Protestant, it is not something I grew up with.  I must confess, I love the sublime quiet and introspection I find in a monastery, especially Trappist ones who practice the vow of silence.

   After my wonderful and "wordsful" weekend on Star Island, I long for the serenity of having a "wordless" experience.  It will be only me, my camera and my journal.  I've often said monastic retreats are a way for me to recharge my contemplative batteries.  I have two wonderful and inspirational books to bring and the weather looks like it will be ideal but the weather would have made no difference.  If there is anything I have learned from my years of practicing contemplative photography it is this.  We will receive the images we need, when we need them.  We may think we are there to photograph one thing but, in truth, we are there to receive the photographs we are gifted.  Once I settled into this frame of mind I found the experience, wherever I am, so much richer and illuminating.

   I've never visited St. Joseph's but I've bought their jams and jellies for years.  They are also the only Trappist brewery in America and no, before you start to giggle, that is not why I'm going there!  I am just seeking out a contemplative location I don't have to travel 3,000 miles to stay in and this one is in a particularly beautiful location.  I hope you have a lovely and contemplative weekend as well, no matter where you are or what you do.

   You can read other posts from Gethsemani...

Thomas Merton's Gethsemani

Brother Paul Quenon  

Thomas Merton's Hermitage

  

The Serenity of Fog...

   The lake was enveloped in a rolling fog bank.  It soften the landscape and imbued the water with lovely tints of blue and mauve.  I love fog.

The fog is an illusion—
A master of disguise,
Which hides the tangible
Before our very eyes.

 - Walterrean Salley

 

       Fog softens sounds as well, like snowfall does.  Before the lake awoke this particular morning, the landscape was hushed, wrapped in a cloak of silence and serenity.  A half hour later it vanished and the landscape came to life but for these tranquil few minutes, the world was at peace.

   In the Autumn in New England, we often awaken to fog.  The air is chilling but the land and water are still warm.  I experienced this lovely effect at "my" pond recently.  Even though the sun was shinning in my yard, less than a mile from the pond, here everything was enveloped in mist.  The sun was trying to break through but a moment later the distant shore disappeared entirely only to re- appear a few minutes later.

   I noticed the same raising and lowering of the veil out on Star Island where the Atlantic fog bank alternately revealed and concealed adjacent Appledore Island.

   Seaside or pond-side, the effect is always similar. There is a purple tinge to the air caused by the water droplets in the fog and always an enveloping silence.When you are by the sea you can almost taste the salt in the misty air.

   My poetic soul loves the metaphor of fog as well.  We see and then we don't see...things appear and disappear as if by magic.  There is a message here...

Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves

that all of life is not black and white.

- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Looking Beneath the Surface...

   Thoreau called a pond the "earth's eyes" which reflects the many moods of Nature.  I've come to appreciate this even more intimately with my many visits to Little Clemons Pond these past two months.

   The pond surface can change within minutes.  This day, an approaching rain storm turned the surface into silver silk...a really stunning effect.

   Or perhaps I should say "affect".  I'm am beginning to see an emotional component to the water that I never thought of before.  Normally the water is serenely still, only disturbed by a passing breeze that, as it did above, just rippled the water surface.  I decided to introduce a bit of chaos to the sublime tranquility of my little pond.

    PLOP!  A small stone I tossed into the pond created beautiful ripples and a kind of quick silver surface.  The lily pads rocked back and forth and the circle widened until, in less than a minute, all was returned to a lovely calm.

   The pond absorbed my interference with ease.  It seems to me that tranquility and peace is the natural character of the pond.  It takes disturbance in stride and quietly returns to its preferred state.

   I walked away knowing that, yet again, the pond had something to teach me.  We may not be able to avoid life's disturbances...intrusions into our calm...but we can let them run their course, absorb them into ourselves and then return to our preferred way of being.  They subtly change us but they can not alter our essential being in the long run.  I hope I can remember that the next time a "disturbance" in my life occurs...this too shall pass, says the pond.

Conversations with my Mother...

Class of 1938

  This is a very personal project for me but I feel that there are immense contemplative possibilities in revisiting old family photographs and I want to share the idea with you.

   I grew up in an era where communication between children and their parents was not as free flowing as it is now.  In my house, this was even more exaggerated.  You simply didn't talk, about personal things, with Mom or Dad.

   How I wish that wasn't so but now I am using the old photographs of my Mother to have a conversation of sorts...a conversation I wish I had had but didn't.

   I'm altering the images and incorporating the "dialogue" into the photograph.  Questions I never dared ask...observations she probably wouldn't have been open to.  My Mother died in 2002, and though I won't receive answers to my questions, this project is helping me forge a new relationship, in some ways, with a woman I really can't say I 'knew' all that well.  That is a terribly sad thing to write but it is the truth.

   Is there someone from your past that you wish you could talk to now?  What would you ask them?  Consider having a conversation with the past as a way of clarifying long held feelings.  You may not be able to right old wrongs or resolve old differences but sometimes just writing it down can heal the soul.
  

Contemplating Public Art...

   I have always been drawn to photographing sculptures in the landscape...old cemeteries being a favorite haunt of mine (pardon the pun!).  This is a public sculpture at the University of New England in Portland, Maine.  They had several pieces surrounding the building but I was drawn to this one especially.

   I think it is because I'm working on a book project, "Conversations with my Mother", using old photographs that I'm scanning and altering.  I believe that what occupies your mind directs your lens.  It seems so for me anyway.

   What we see depends on

what we look for.

- John Lubbock

...and what we look for is what is in our hearts at that moment.  There is a direct line of communication between the heart and the eye...it often by-passes the head altogether.  That is why we are sometimes puzzled by what we see on our memory card when we return home.  Our head wants to know why we made that image, the heart already knows.

   I've also begun to use these photographs of sculptures in my digital collages.  This is one that I used in the last post on A Sacred Journey, a wonderful site that hosted four posts from my Threshold Pilgrimage in June.  Digital collage is something I want to pursue during the months to come.  It is a whole new area for me but it seems perfect for the contemplative photographer.

   You might like to take advantage of the summer sunshine and explore public art installations.  Here is a link to some possibilities but I'm sure you will have no problem finding some near to your home...there is always an old cemetery just waiting for you to explore!

Explore Public Art

A related past post:

Meditations in a Graveyard

My Own Personal Walden Pond...

The Poetry of Place: 

Reflections from the Edge of the Pond 

 I had decided to take a sabbatical from the blog for the month of July. I needed rest and
recuperation...a break from the daily posting.  I had no intention of putting my camera away however.

   What I needed was a focus close to home.  I found it less than a mile from my house...my own personal Walden Pond.  I'd photographed it before, of course, but in a more random way.  On the 29th of June I began a systematic photographic study of the pond.  I plan to visit a few times each week over the course of next year at different times of day and in different weather.

   Little Clemons Pond is a bit smaller than Walden, only 25 acres to Walden's 61 acres, but it has no buildings along its shores...very unusual in this part of Southern Maine.  This is because one family owns all the surrounding land.  I received permission to walk its shoreline for this series.  Of course, they don't "own" the pond, no one can own a body of water in Maine, and I hope to take to a canoe to explore the pond from another viewpoint.

   I am no naturalist to be sure but I hope to take a cue from Thoreau and keep a journal of my observations. This is a project that I can envelop myself in on so many levels.  I look forward to sharing some of the images I receive with you as I progress through the year.  On this first day, it was the reflections that captivated me.

   I had been so consumed with my Threshold Pilgrimage for so long that the let down when I returned was more like a crash and burn experience.  Now, I felt I had a new, less stressful, focus for my camera work and writing.

   I've visited the pond 5 or 6 times since my first visit on the 29th and have amassed dozens of images and pages of journal entries.  I am also re-reading Walden and I feel closer to Thoreau, on an emotional level, now than I ever have, even after nearly 40 years of visiting Walden.  I can understand his fascination for a place.

   A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.  - Henry David Thoreau

   Have you ever considered finding your own Walden?  Maybe it won't be a pond but for me the concept of 'Walden' represents a place of retreat and contemplation for the seeking soul and it needn't be faraway or hard to get to.  Find one if you can and then make a commitment to visit on a regular basis over the course of a year.  See what it has to teach you...

Clarifying our Vision...

An insight from my Walden Wood walk.

..the camera becomes more than a means to record our vision; it becomes a means to help clarify it. 

 - David duChenin

   Every time we put the camera to our eye we are attempting to record our vision but, as David duChenin states above, the images that we make help us to clarify that vision as well.  We may think we are making an image for one reason but the landscape may have an entirely different message for us.

   We record and edit.  In the old film days, we thought long and hard before we made an image.  We didn't want to waste film. Now there is no need to worry about that but people still feel the need to "trash" images to save space on their memory card.  I use to do that and now I never do.  I bring an external hard drive and download the entire days images...every last one.  As a friend once advised me..."Save them all...the good, the bad and the ugly."  The photograph above, and many like it, is the reason why I stopped deleting images from my card.

   It wasn't until long after my walk around Walden Pond that I came across this image in the file for that days photographing.  It stunned me really as I looked at it on the computer screen although it had hardly registered when I made it.  

    It seemed as if half the image was in black and white and half was in color but I assure you, this is what my camera recorded.  I made this photograph when I was just beginning to photograph in color...just stepping away from an exclusively monochrome approach to my vision as a photographer.  This image seemed to acknowledge that transition in a very graphic way.  I was able to reflect on it and see that there will always be these two sides to me and that's just fine.  I don't have to be one or the other...I can be both.

   Read the rest of duChenin's wonderful essay on vision here.  Make a promise to yourself, right now, that you will save all your photographs from now on.  They all have the potential for meaningful reflection.

Up Close or Far Away?

   My first exhibit was called Up Close and Far Away and comprised my black and white images of the Outer Hebrides made in 2005.  I've always loved that phrase and one Spring morning, on my way to the mailbox, it inspired this image and post.

   Some photographers go for the "long view"...the expansive panorama...the breath taking landscape a la Ansel Adams.  Others  focus on the close up...the intimate, near to hand view point.  And then there are some who want an infinite depth of field so they can take in both...they want it both ways!

    I would say I am firmly in the Up Close Camp...the tiny, precious blue bells in the foreground as opposed to the dazzling mass of forsythia in the background.  I must say, however, I like them seen together and by having only one in focus, I can demonstrate my preference.

   Each season has it's own color contrasts.  Spring can offer either subtle soft contrasts or vividly stark ones.  I love both.  Seen like this, I can contemplate the contrast and not just the individual colors.

   The next time you are out in an immense and breath taking landscape, take the time to see what is right at your feet...turn your lens down here and not just out there.  Forget worrying about the depth of field...make a choice...up close or far away?