Around the island . . . clinging vines in Langley

Nothing like cold weather to reveal the underlying architecture of trees, bushes, and vines.

Although this wall is beautiful mid-summer, cloaked in lush green leaves, I prefer it mid-winter, seeing how the vines gently snake their way up a sky-blue downspout, or angle away, exploring new territory.

Ah, the joys of meandering back alleys, finding beauty in unexpected places.

May your day contain at least one encounter with unexpected beauty.

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your kindness.

Capitalizing on one's strengths

When it comes to photography, since I've been doing it for so long, I pretty much know my strengths and my weaknesses. And my temperament.

My technical side is sufficient to get me by, and I continue to learn.

What I'm particularly good at is seeing. I can find cool stuff in the weirdest places and can create something I think is artistically satisfying.

So wandering around in a boatyard a few days ago (giddy as an eight-year-old visiting Disneyland for the first time), I found a few bits of rusty, scratched, weathered, sanded, abraded, painted, and faded boat hulls, railings, doors,  and dumpsters to zoom in on.

I hereby inflict my bizarre proclivities upon you.

"Blue Boulders, Red Sea" is something I found on a railing. I don't know what made the rounded forms, but mine is not to question why . . . All I knew was that it was colorful, weird, and that I should keep my horizon line low.

And then I especially liked the rakish angle of the gouged metal in "Sail on a Rusty Sea." Again, low horizon line, very strong diagonality going on, and the look and feel of a sailboat heeling over.

Texture as metaphor. Texture that perhaps looks like something else. That conjures up images that are one thing, yet maybe another. Just another way of seeing. And thinking.

 ©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

Just Plane Art . . .

Put me in an air museum and this is what I tend to see — not the whole picture, but little vignettes such as these.

Although I love that I can see this way, can pick out little bits of what others might consider nothingness and make them look cool, I wish I could also grasp the big picture and make something equally interesting out of that.

And isn't that the beauty of photography (and of art in general)? Each of us sees in our own unique way. And each of us creates in our own unique way.

Add to that the fact that we all can share what we do so easily via the Internet, that we can also see and be inspired by others via the Internet.

Ah, 'tis a good time to be an artist, don't you think?

Wishing us all years of creativity ahead. And years of seeing and sharing what we're doing.

©Carol Leigh

Boat bits . . .

Once again I neglect the big picture to zoom in on details, details I find important but that most people find inconsequential. It's a talent and a curse! Creating images such as these just make me feel good.

The first is a running light on a little tugboat, the second a few ropes hanging down the side of a fishing boat. I like the complementary red/green colors on the tug as well as the curvy lines of the light contrasted with the hard, straight lines of the rail and striping.

Contrast again comes into play in the second photo, with the two straight-ish lines of the ropes contrasting with the curved metal element. The sunlight on the ropes contrasts with the dark red element of the boat hull and the black shadowy area on the left.

Hey, my vision might be limited, but at least I know why I find the things I do!

©Carol Leigh

What I saw / What I made

Wandering around the docks, I spotted this netted container with a pile of beautiful blue rope and some rusty stuff. It was the color that caught my eye and I liked how the complementary orange/rust elements looked against all that blue.

I isolated the hook and used that as my focal point. At first I shot it nestled in among the ropes, but then reasoned that if the hook "hangs things," maybe I should give it some "hanging room" at the bottom. Which version is better? I'm not sure. What do you think? ©Carol Leigh

What I saw / What I made . . .

As many of you know, I'm much better finding small details than I am at seeing the bigger picture, but here I show you the bigger picture and then show you what I zoomed in on.

Big bundles of colorful fishing nets are stacked all over in this, one of my favorite spots for photography. For some reason I never take overviews, but I walk around, carefully looking for clean, simple compositions. In the first photo, the overview, I've circled in red what caught my eye. What I made of the scene is there in the second photo. (Click to enlarge.)

What I liked about what I saw were the repeating patterns of the ropes and how they dipped and curved, all that horizontality held together by that one light blue rope in the left third of the frame. I liked, too, the one big thick rope up top and the bit of netting in the lower left. Those two elements, combined with the vertical rope, break the horizontal pattern and add a bit of interest.

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Wishing you lots of bold compositions, lines, and designs today and every day. ©Carol Leigh

No, it isn't . . .

When you saw the thumbnail of this image, did you think it was a sunset photo? It's actually a close-up of tree bark that I photographed in San Diego. Photography is first and foremost about seeing, and when I saw the tree and its bark patterns, I saw a potential landscape. ©Carol Leigh, wishing you a new day seen with new eyes . . .

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 . . .

What do you see?

A few months ago Chris and I went to a local art gallery. The display was of incredibly delicate yet bold weavings. I asked permission to take close-ups of the details — not the entire weaving, just bits and pieces — and was kindly allowed to do so. Hoo ha! Because what I was seeing in the details looked to me like miniature abstract land/seascapes. A rain squall moved across the ocean, waves undulated past, and a headland stood out over a dark sea.

Remember the "art from art" photo walk I did in San Francisco where we extracted bits and pieces, created compositions from huge murals? Well, this is sort of the same thing on a smaller scale.

And isn't that what we're doing with photography in general? We see something, anything, and we extract, create, and present just a section of the whole, whether it's a photograph of Earth from outer space or the eye of a fly in an electron microscope. We've zoomed in on just a part of the whole with the eye of an artist. We see. We think "wow!" We compose. We calculate the light. We tweak our settings. And then we present that "wow" to whoever will be polite enough to look at what we did.

The woman in charge of the gallery that day was quite polite when I showed her my weaving "landscapes" in my viewfinder. Undoubtedly thought I was crazy, but she was very, very polite.

©Carol Leigh, hoping that today you look just a bit longer at something and find that "wow" . . .

A view from a couch

In a couple of weeks I'm giving a short talk in North Carolina and so right now I've got "seeing" on my mind. The other day I was sitting on the couch, getting acquainted with a camera, and I quickly took a few photos. This morning I realized that for just sitting on the couch, snapping away, the photos aren't bad. They're not great, but — and this is important — I made the most of the situation. I looked, composed, and clicked the shutter.

Abby across the room stayed put for a few minutes, contemplating a basket of agates, where she will carefully select one, drag it out of the basket, and hide it under a chair or cabinet. A vase of dried poppy pods on the "Holly Cabinet" caught my eye, the way the sun shone on a floor lamp, shadows on a knob, and the simple inlay on a cedar chest completed the mix.

Could I have taken more? Yes. But photography wasn't my goal right then. Figuring out the functions of the camera was what I was working on.

The point of all this is that seeing, looking, noticing are the quietly important aspects of photography. Cameras do so much for us and so easily that we often forget the human being behind the viewfinder, our unique vision, the thing that makes our photos ours. Teaching someone to see is the most challenging part of my job. But sometimes it just requires sitting on a couch, looking around. ©Carol Leigh