Seeing

One of my favourite photographers is Freeman Patteron . He has written a number of books and one of my favourites is 'Photography and the Art of Seeing'. In it, he challenges you to find some photographically pleasing aspect of something that you might find very ordinary. Not an easy task, and not something that we all necessarily have a knack for. He also challenges you to turn your camera on, on a bleak, dreary day when the light seems flat and the visual world seems rather mundane. It is a difficult task, but well worth the effort if you are patient enough to keep looking and often you'll be surprised with the results.

I enjoy picking that book up every so often to inspire me to get outside and challenge myself a little more. With that in mind, I went outside at 6AM on a Tuesday to visit our Tulip Festival grounds along the canal. Tulips, you are probably thinking, is an easy subject, and the light of course is just a perfect golden colour...how could you go wrong...?

Well, honestly, I don't know that you could. But I started out taking pics of all the flowers together and trying to get everything into the shot. The flowers, the buds, the stems, the ground, the sky...I mean everything! When I started to look at the pics, I was thoroughly disappointed and uninspired...

I was about to give up, when I thought about Freeman and his approach (and it should have been my approach from the beginning) to a photograph. So, it got down on my stomach, and got in close to the flowers themselves. Below the surface of all the flowers was a whole new world! There were bugs and soil and the flowers that hadn't even opened up yet! Here is one of the pics.

Enjoy your day!