InSpring: that feeling.
And how do I
express, convey, record, or transmute it?
Because it pervades, it’s the air, it’s
heavy lilac scent and a
rabbit disappearing
under a hedge, it is birdsong, breeze-on-cheek
and buttercups,
wild-seeded on the margins.
We feel it underneath the
blessing of leafed-out branches,
light
suffusing through the veins,
and neurons…
throughout.
I can try.
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Photographed at Bellevue Botanical Garden, 04/22/2016
At Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the flower sellers are a major attraction. Photographing the seasonal bouquets is almost as popular as buying them – maybe more so. The colors are delicious, but what interests me even more than the displays is what’s behind the scenes. The long row of market stalls backs up onto Pike Place, where they are open to the street. Workers often pull heavy plastic tarps down between the flower-crammed work tables and the old brick street. Buckets of flowers get pushed up against the tarp, flattening some of the blooms into two dimensional compositions. Seen from the street, through the scratched scrim of worn plastic tarps, the bouquets take on a whole different look.
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There I am on the brick street outside the market, wading through the debris from the flower stalls. In heaven.
Behind the scenes – market interior on the right, street to the left.
Inside the market, long rows of gorgeous locally grown flowers, and happy customers.
Parting shot
The photos were taken with my older model Samsung phone and processed in Lightroom. I was near Pike Place for a conference that day and I didn’t have my camera, but the phone did the trick.
Spring isn’t all a cherry blossom delight….
A pond at a public garden, choked with a heavy bloom of algae. Too shallow and still to support much life other than the algae, and littered with old leaves, it actually made me want to avert my eyes. The balance was off – there was probably insufficient oxygen to support a healthy mix of species. I used to garden for a living and I don’t like to see gardens neglected.
Still, there was beauty there, with the branches of a Japanese maple bending gracefully to the muddy water. I took a photograph, and later I exaggerated the softness to make it all about the drifting colors.
Bruised, fallen Magnolia petals mingle with last year’s dead leaves – beauty underfoot.
Also seen at the garden, intricate textures on the surface of a granite boulder. Instead of Spring’s pretty pastels, the boulder contained a subtly colored miniature map, almost like a view from space.
A clutch of tiny maple flowers glows deep crimson against lime green leaves. Looking up and peering very closely, odd bits of stamens and petals come into focus.
A Japanese maple’s dusky, thread-like new leaves stretch tentatively into the air.
Another view of the pond where fish don’t swim, frogs don’t vocalize and ducks won’t paddle. It has a beauty of its own.
Photos taken at Kubota Gardens in Seattle.
The urge to get outside, to create, to look in wonder and enter into the season – it’s undeniable.
From the bottom,
Crab apple blossoms, Maidenhair fern, a pine cone, a Magnolia branch in flower, A Magnolia bloom, fallen Magnolia flower petals, maple twigs with their dangling flower parts, more Maidenhair ferns in black and white, last year’s Magnolia leaf, chewed by insects, and the long, elegant needles of the Montezuma pine. All were seen Friday at Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle, Washington.
Note on processing:
I procrastinated about buying the excellent Nik Silver Efex program for converting color photos to black and white. It was just as well because last week, the program became free to all, along with several other Nik programs for digital processing. I’m just getting the hang of it and I expect I’ll find the suite of programs very useful. The first photo, of a pine bough, takes a bright, sunshiny image to a dark place, thanks to the Color Efex program; the second photo’s creaminess was exaggerated with that program’s settings, too. Sometimes though, it’s best to leave well enough alone – the final photo has only very minor tweaks in Lightroom.
All photos taken with an OM D-1 with Olympus 60mm f 2.8 macro lens. Yes, I brought other lenses, but I only had two hours. Changing lenses takes time, to switch out the lens and to reboot your eyes to the new lens. Besides, I just love this lens.
Next some near-abstract images, also derived from outdoor shots. Coming soon…
bluebrightly 