In search of landscapes . . .

Chris and I will be painting studio walls all day today, and perhaps installing an overhead light fixture. Baseboards will come a little later, but maybe, just maybe, we can put some furniture in place tomorrow and I can take some photographs.

In the meantime, however, I offer you these three images. At one time I thought a good lesson in seeing would be to find "landscapes" anywhere, in tree bark, rocks, rusty metal, etc. (And aren't you glad you weren't a part of that!)

I think it's a good lesson, though, and if I were still doing my online classes, I would definitely put it in the mix. Here's what I mean. This first photo is a close-up of a weaving, a very large weaving, but I immediately saw a landscape, a land formation, in just a part of it. I asked the gallery for permission to take a close-up shot and this is what I made. It could be a headland of sorts, with the ocean a small element at the base.

And this shot could conceivably have been taken from the deck of a ship as it passed a cold and snowy coastline. In actuality, it's a close-up of the side of a fishing boat that was being sanded and repaired.

And finally, doesn't this bit of cement look a lot like Diamond Head on Oahu? Cracks in cement had been filled in and then had turned a darker color as a result, so the formation stood out.

For me, one who rarely sees the big picture, but who can easily find something small and abstract, this is a fun exercise. How about you? If you're a big-picture sort, your challenge is to find something small and make something of it. Like these three (yes, weird) "landscapes."

 ©Carol Leigh
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Yaquina Bay Road

We had a brief window of opportunity on Sunday morning to get outside without getting wet, so we drove up Yaquina Bay Road to Toledo. The clouds were beautiful, the air crisp and clean, the trees stately, and the waters calm. A lovely morning.

We had 90 inches of rain last year. Can you imagine? Ninety inches? But it's moments such as this that make the rain almost bearable. ©Carol Leigh

Landscapes in the metal

I photograph a lot of scratched metal, from fishing boat hulls to dumpsters to enormous containers that fit inside the holds of boats. And when I do, I tend to find bits and pieces that are like little landscapes, primarily based upon a strong "horizon line." Most of these photos were actually shot as verticals, knowing that later I'd rotate them to form a more traditional landscape.

Here you see how a welded seam turns into a sort of "crashing wave with rocks and mountains," how the marks on a fishing boat hull turn into a sky full of birds, how rivulets of rust become layers of hills moving into the distance, how scratches and gouges on a fishing boat could look like a sailboat race, and then how two of the photos look when blended together.

When we are wandering about with our cameras, it behooves us to ask, "what does this look like?" when choosing what to photograph. There are landscapes beyond the obvious, just waiting to be seen.

©Carol Leigh, just waiting to be seen . . .