Penning Photography Daily

I kept seeing the sky full of dancing clouds today.

More than once, I wanted to grab my camera and rush outside to grab another spectacle in the sky. I kept bottling it up inside until I walked out after work. I was rewarded for my patience with clouds all around my head.

I grabbed my Panasonic LX3, and selected this setting for my one and only grab. I had a bunch of errands to do before heading to choir practice tonight, so I wanted to get a good one.

There’s something inside me that I’ve been training, with every snap of the shutter. The more I practice and reflect on what I’ve taken, the better I get at these quick compositions, especially if I don’t think about it much but go with what my inner instinct tells my hands to do. I really didn’t think about my composition. I kept walking as I opened and set my camera up, looked up and did a quick framing and single snap of the shutter. I kept walking, after a quick review on the back of the screen, hoping for the best.

This one reminded me of a large wave, calling out to the surfers on the shore to come ride the wild crest of nature.

This ant is doing it’s part to keep the growth cycle going, both it’s own and that of the flower it’s digging on.

I just happened to see it roaming and rooting through the flower’s golden stamen, looking for it’s own sustenance and picking up pollen to carry on to another flower. The constant work, unceasing effort is what fascinates me about ants. Another of Nature’s marvels.

Me, I have to rest in order to renew and start fresh.

For example, I seem to be in a lull for taking daily photographs. It happens from time to time. I get a bit overworked, or under nourished (in the inner creative spirit way), and need to just rest a bit, or concentrate on something else. This pause never lasts long. There’s a constant stream of interest flooding my eyes everyday. Something will speak to me and I’ll have to pay attention to it, grab my camera and try to capture a bit of what struck me.

In the mean time, I’ve got tens of thousands of photos in my archives, like this one from two years ago, that are just waiting for me to take the time to revisit and rediscover the special something that reached out and grabbed my attention.

Lucky me.

Once more for the orchid group.

What gets me about this one is when you look at it up close, how incredibly hairy it is. See here: farm5.static.flickr.com/4025/4420866739_231c062784_o.jpg

Another of Nature’s interesting aspects. There’s enough interest in the world around me to last several lifetimes. Imagine the wonders that are in the vast universe of stars and planets. I’d never be bored.

Being an observer of life is plenty enough to fill my cup to overflowing. When I hear someone, or worse, feel myself being bored, that’s when I realize there’s too much inward looking going on and not enough appreciation of life that’s beyond me.

Going for a walk, in any weather, is enough to fill notebooks with what bits of beauty, nuances of nature, wonders of the wide world that lay within reach of my feet.

Even the tiny hairs on this orchid are fascinating. I’d overlooked them before, when I first reviewed this photo two years ago. Lucky me, I’ve got new eyes to see them and appreciate their particular peculiarity.

There’s a reason that the sun, the sky & clouds all touch something deep inside.

With these elements of our universe dancing in perfect harmony, we are able to live. Without them, we would cease live. .

At a base level, the sun, the sky & clouds sustain our life. The air we have to breath, the warmth to keep us from freezing, light to enable our food to grow, and clouds to bring water, which is what each of us is mostly made of.

So when I see this tableau of the sun and moisture-laden clouds against the blue sky backdrop, I’m moved in wonder and make to grab it with my camera.

The dark band of clouds looks like a river of moisture. At once both compelling to look at and allows me to see the clear outline of the sun, which, in a clear sky, I would be unable to glance at, nor see it’s perfect roundness.

A simple scene, but one which reminds me of my good fortune and clear dependence.

One thing my dad and I had in common, is our love for a good mystery novel. I started off pooh-poohing my parent’s love of mysteries and plunged into what remains a love of good science-fiction. Gradually, that vein, especially the good stuff, waned for me, and I picked up one of his or mom’s books. I found delight of another sort in the carefully crafted tales of murder and mayhem.

One of my favorites mystery series, which I enjoy re-reading every decade or so, is the Rex Stout books featuring the larger-than-life Nero Wolfe and his able assistant Archie Goodwin. Out of my devouring the Nero Wolfe mysteries came my fascination for that loveliest of flowers, the orchid. Nero Wolfe had an extensive greenhouse on the roof of his New York townhouse. He stuck to a rigid schedule of spending four hour each and every day tending his orchid collection with the help of his greenhouse caretaker, Horstmann. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe

My love of the many shades of purple drew me to this cluster of orchid flowers, hanging in the Washington Park Botanical Garden. I could stand and soak up the beauty in these flowers by the hour. Delicate yet strong in color, looking like acrobats how they dangle from ever lengthening shoots. Fascinating and full of life.

So I present them to you, as a harbinger of the coming Spring, when the mystery of Winter is solved in the green growth that bursts into new life. An endless cycle of wonder and delight.

My son Chris took this of me.

Chris works in the same building as I do. That’s a happy circumstance that neither of us thought would be in our future. I recall, after having Chris spend a whole day with me during one of the early “Take your child to work” days, Chris said: “I never want to do what you do!” Said with such emphasis, that we both figured it would stand firm.

Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

In this case, we both consider ourselves very fortunate that our career paths crossed in the way that they have. One of the benefits is that we spend lunch time together, often enough to enjoy, but not often enough that we both feel confined by it. The subject of our mutual passion in photography usually comes up and fills the time with lively discussion.

Since I always have a camera with me, on this occasion, I had my Pentax K10D with the Takumar 135mm f2.5 attached. It’s a fully manual lens of a distant vintage. I like the color, contrast and out of focus area of the lens and was trying it out. Chris started exploring it, and took a series of portraits of me, this being the one I like.

Chris asked me to pose, so I set my gaze out my office windows and just looked naturally, trying to relax.

I’m counting my blessings, I suppose. I’m so fortunate to have a good relationship with my son, have a job I love, a partner in life I’m in love with, and a passion for capturing the special nature of the moments of life with my photography.

Life is good.

Sometimes, you have to play around with your equipment, just to keep in touch, or to explore the characteristics that the equipment and you bring together.

It has been a while since I’d worked with this fine vintage lens. It’s pre-1975 vintage, Ashai Takumar 135mm f/2.5. It has it’s quirks, but the creamy out of focus area is one of the hallmarks that I love.

In this tableau of pens, sitting in a candle cup on top of my desk, I love the isolation that makes the pens stand out. That dark blob in the background is an office chair. I focused with a wide-open aperture on the top of the silver pen to the right.

Something simple.

I’ll be working a bunch this weekend on a server upgrade, so I might find more simple things to explore, if I have any down time waiting for something or another to finish. I’ll just look around and see what I see.