Simplicity — Jon's Photoblog

Welcome back! This month we have flowers, bugs, abstracts, birds, sweeping scenes, and hopefully enough drama to keep you awake.

Let’s start with the flowers. Every week there are new and different blooms, and the different bugs that love them. I finally got a shot of a green metallic bee that was so fleeting and elusive last year. This one is foraging on a Giallardia flower:

My favourite though were the Three Flower Avens, so-called because they usually bloom in triples:

The blooms turn the grasslands into patches of wispy rose mist:

One giant drop left over from the rain the night before, lit by the morning light, was a welcome sight:

The wild roses bloom fleetingly, but still beautiful as they fade:

Finally, a single Yellow Goat’s Beard navigates a maze of fallen poplar branches:

As a way of transition, I’d call this an abstract, but it’s “organic” 🙂 A lone sprig of dogwood against a poplar. It looks simple enough, but I had to wait 20 minutes between seeing it and snapping the shot, as both sun and wind were moving relentlessly, and shadows from the surrounding trees kept casting across the leaves, or obscuring the moss, which is a subtle but essential part of the composition:

This one (the title shot) is a bit more legitimately abstract, an almost perfect spiral past the shell, like bits of a comet as it pinwheels towards the sun:

But is it honest? I mean, such a perfect arrangement just “there” on the beach, it’s almost too good to be true… 😉 This is maybe worth a confession and discussion. Here’s the original scene:

The main elements are still there, and the three stones right of the shell still naturally curl away in a phantom continuation of the spiral, which was what caught my attention in the first place. The line of stones curving from the top of the shell down the left side also support the spiral, but the scene as a whole is quite cluttered.

Generally I’m pretty picky about whether or not such manipulation should be done. Part of it is just my own personal challenge of having to work with what is there, but I’ve slowly become a bit less shy of removing an errant single blade of dead grass running through a scene (living elements are off limits). But I thought this might be a different case, plus, I wanted to see what would happen 😁 So I took a “precision crafted surgical twig”, and carefully moved the top and left pebbles, the bottom centre darker pebble, and slightly adjusted the small white pebble top right. The remaining three pebbles were untouched.

Is the cleaned up image a better shot? Personally that’s a “hell ya” from me. Simplicity is often what this hobby is about, and it’s definitely simplified.

Is it true? I’m pretty sure that’s a “hell naw”, because it’s too uncanny to be true. At this point I can’t decide whether that spoils it for me. It’s one I’ll have to ponder, even if I really like the aesthetic result.

Anyway, let’s move on to birds. A bit more drama here, as these photo-pairs show. This great egret was eyeing a dragonfly, which was too nimble to be nabbed, so instead the egret turned around a caught a fish, and the dragonfly sped off:

Next up we have a raven who sort of flumped down at the side of the road near me, mouth open almost gasping. It wasn’t that hot and there was water all around, so I wasn’t sure what was up, until a red-wing blackbird began dive-bombing the raven:

Perhaps it was justified vengeance.

And perhaps it was the same red-wing blackbird who later perched on a post and wanted to tell me all about it. I’m sure it was a good story, he certainly went on for a while, but I was more interested in the perfect angles formed by the post and his posture:

Finally, this shy bird has been at the top of my “trophy shot” list for a while. I’ve seen a few Scarlet Tanagers in the past few years, but, as if they are taunting me, every time I find one it takes off, usually just before I snap the shutter. This one must have thought he was well-hidden, but I found a tiny gap in the foliage. The gap was too small for the camera’s focusing system, which kept focusing on the leaves in between, so I had to focus manually. Thankfully, thinking he was well-hidden, he didn’t move much, so I finally had a little time to get it right:

Let’s cap this off with three landscape shots. I mentioned simplicity above, and my hope is that all three embody that principle. First, I do love me a black and white cloudy sky, and a dead tree certainly helps: