Hibernation

"If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, 'Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.' And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

- Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
Quoted by Walter Isaacson

Liminal State of Awareness

"There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond."

- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage

Vibration of Spirit

"The vibration of Spirit is at such an infinite rate of intensity and rapidity that it is practically at rest — just as a rapidly moving wheel seems to be motionless. And at the other end of the scale, there are gross forms of matter whose vibrations are so low as to seem at rest. Between these poles, there are millions upon millions of varying degrees of vibration. From corpuscle and electron, atom and molecule, to worlds and universes, everything is in vibratory motion. This is also true on the planes of energy and force (which are but varying degrees of vibration); and also on the mental planes (whose states depend upon vibrations); and even on to the spiritual planes. An understanding of this Principle, with the appropriate formulas, enables Hermetic students to control their own mental vibrations as well as those of others. The Masters also apply this Principle to the conquering of Natural phenomena, in various ways. 'He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the sceptre of Power,' says one of the old writers.

...

...the differences between different
manifestations of Matter, Energy,
Mind, and even Spirit, result
largely from varying rates of Vibrations...
...the higher the vibration,
the higher the position in the scale."

- William Walker Atkinson (1862 - 1932)
Three Initiates, Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece

Postscript. In February of this year, I wrote about how the morning walks my wife and I took together during the pandemic (which we could do since I did not have to commute to my regular office; something which, sadly, I've had to resume doing recently) gave me an opportunity to see and appreciate how much beauty our local neighborhood offers. Back then, I was mesmerized with the "hosta-leaf corpses" that littered the sidewalks near our house, and which appeared to glow with a preternatural inner light. To communicate a sense of what first drew me to them (i.e., their radiance), I rendered them using reversed black and white tones (a small portfolio is here). Almost a year later, as we approach late autumn, I find my eye/I drawn to the radiance - or, better, to the colorful afterglow - of decaying maple leaves. Just as the all-but-decayed hosta leaves stubbornly clung to life with a mysterious and inexhaustible energy, the just-starting-to-decay maple leaves are now doing the same, but are suffused in an ineffably iridescent brilliance! There is a palpable fire burning inside that refuses to let go! I've tried to capture this ethereal energy by placing the leaves on a light table (using one that is sufficiently bright to illuminate the veins of the leaves), and rendering the final image on a dark backdrop in Photoshop. Although, as with the hostas, my maple macros only partly convey the excitement I felt as I encountered individual leaves, much of my raw emotion remains (albeit only in "Stieglitzian Equivalent" form). The image above is an amalgam of the photographs in a new "maple autumn macros" portfolio. Enjoy 😊

Whirling Light

"Rotating systems often break axisymmetry; were it not so, there would be no hurricanes. There are steadier examples: the skirts of the 'whirling dervish' carry cusped wave patterns which seem to defy gravity and common sense.

...

We consider a rotating, conically symmetric surface made out of a sheet of material that is constrained not to stretch or compress in two dimensions, but is perfectly flexible with respect to bending in the third. The symmetry of the surface permits an additional material flow to be superimposed on the rotation of the surface, leading to Coriolis forces. The equations describing this system yield a three-parameter family of exact solutions, some of which bear a close resemblance to the patterns on a dervish's skirt. We find that the Coriolis terms that arise from the additional flow are crucial for these types of patterns to exist.

...

The results widen our understanding of the dynamics of flexible objects and of pattern formation in rotating systems. They may also shed some light on previously known instabilities of turbine disks and hard disks. Finally, they bring a bit of science into the otherwise nebulous world of the mystic, and address a phenomenon that has been observed with aesthetic pleasure for hundreds of years."

- J. Guven, J. Hanna and M. Müller,
"Whirling skirts and rotating cones,"
New Journal Of Physics (Nov, 2013)

Postscript. The images in the diptych that I took with my iPhone recently (of light reflecting off of cars parked onto the walls of a local garage) reminded me of Rumi's "Whirling Dervishes," about which you can read here and here (in considerably less technical detail than the one you'll find if you follow the link to the physics journal!)

“You are water, whirling water,
Yet still water trapped within,
Come, submerge yourself within us,
We who are the flowing stream.
...
We came whirling out of nothingness,
scattering stars like dust...
The stars made a circle,
and in the middle,
we dance.”

- Rumi (1207 - 1273

Serendipitous Geometry

"The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous."

- Paul Rand (1914 - 1996)
Paul Rand: A Designer's Art

Postscript. It has been said that the lifeblood of photography is serendipity. While none of the images that make up the triptych above are particularly praiseworthy (beyond, I hope, simply being "interesting" to look at for a a few seconds), the fact that they exist at all is serendipitous. As seems to happen so often, what I planned to photograph and what I found myself photographing this past Sunday are unrelated except that the latter followed naturally - if unpredictably - from the former. Waking up to see a completely overcast sky I rushed to the kitchen to pour a bit of coffee into my commuter cup and took off in my car to go to one of my favorite "cloudy day" parks (Great Falls park in northern VA), about an hour from home. The closer I got to the park, the more "blue sky" was elbowing the clouds away, until, finally, literally as I arrived, the sky had become crystal clear and a strong sun was beating down overhead; far from the quiet diffused light I expected and was rushing over to compose in. Nothing to do but turn around and head back home. Which is what I did, but not before listening to my muse and stopping by the parking lot my wife and I leave our car at when we go to the farmer's market held nearby on Saturdays. Since it was Sunday, the parking lot was deserted, and I had plenty of time to commiserate over a failed trip to Great Falls, rekindle the quiet joy of just being "mindfully in the moment," and rediscover the simple pleasure of looking for "geometric designs" with my camera. As I said, nothing spectacular or noteworthy, and a far cry from what I originally planned to do, but a thoroughly delightful outing nonetheless 😊

Perceptive Play

"The essential activity of science consists of thought, which arises in creative perception and is expressed through play. This gives rise to a process in which thought unfolds into provisional knowledge which then moves outward into action and returns as fresh perception and knowledge. This process leads to a continuous adaptation of knowledge which undergoes constant growth, transformation, and extension. Knowledge is therefore not something rigid and fixed that accumulates indefinitely in a steady way but is a continual process of change. Its growth is closer to that of an organism than a data bank."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Science, Order and Creativity

Materializing the Invisible

"Art resides even in things
with no artistic intentions.

...

Photography is making a copy of reality,
but when it is photographed twice
it goes back to the reality again.
That is my theory.

...

Art is technique: a means by which
to materialize the invisible
realm of the mind.
...

Photography is like a found object.
A photographer never makes an actual subject;
they just steal the image from the world…
Photography is a system of saving memories.
It’s a time machine, in a way,
to preserve the memory,
to preserve time.

...

I’m inviting the spirits
into my photography.
It’s an act of God."

- Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )

Metaphorical Thought

"In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take."

- George Lakoff (1941 - )

The Incomprehensible Void

"We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.

...

My private glimpses of some ideal reality create a lasting mood that that has often been recalled in some of my photographs... the subtle change of light across a waterfall moved me as did a singular vista of a far-off mountain under a leaden sky. Others might well have not responded at all. Deep resonances of spirit exist, giving us glimpses of a reality far beyond our general appreciation, and knowledge... no matter how many stars we see in a clear mountain sky, we now know that they are but a minuscule fragment of the total population of suns and planets in the billions of galaxies out there in the incomprehensible void.

...

The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

...

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Autobiography

Ephemeral Sights

"This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph."

- Bill Jay (1940 - 2009)

"And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually."

- Jimi Hendrix (1942 - 1970)

"All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered."

- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)   

Known and the Unknown

"Reality for me is the known, it is of sense-brain-mind. Existence is the unknown, for no one has created any existence. I experience reality. I believe in existence. Its signals of light and sound as well as all its other signals assail my senses. I don’t know what light or any of the other signals are except that they are manifestations of existence. If I photograph in such a way that I meaningfully evoke a sense of the known and the unknown, I feel I have succeeded."

- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)

Postscript. This diptych contains far too many "meanings" and associations than I can possibly make explicit using mere words. And yet, apart from images and words (as accompanied by omnipresent sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings & intuitions), what is our "world" if not an ever-churning ineffable broth of shared-but-solitary experiences that we wish to communicate some vestiges of to others? This past week, my wife and I had the honor and privilege of settling our youngest child (Josh) into college. It was simultaneously a most joyous and beguilingly melancholy affair, as all parents with college-age offspring know all-too-well. The images in the diptych above were taken a day after we waved to Josh one last time during our "settling-him-in visit" as he headed off to his dorm, at a beach not too far from his college. I was drawn to the fleeting patterns of sand and weeds as they self-organized by the gentle lapping of the waves, only to disassemble and re-organize into myriad other related shapes and geometries as each new wave rolled in. What are we if not conscious bits of "sand and weeds" trying to retain (and understand?) our own transient patterns in the vast - and vastly unknown - phantasmagoric "reality" we call life? What future manifestations of the "pattern" we now call "Josh" will the "waves" of life sculpt in future times? And so, here are some loose associations that this diptych will for me henceforth always be accompanied by whenever my eyes gaze upon it: rhythms (of waves, of winds, and life's energies); ephemerality; yin/yang; known & unknown; memories, longing, and anticipations; the simultaneity of past, present, and future; and - simply and irreducibly - a bird leaves its nest as Josh goes away to college.

Light Prancing

"The artist’s world is limitless.
It can be found anywhere far from
where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep."

- Paul Strand (1890 - 1976)

Postscript. These images were all captured within minutes of each other in a garage near a local farmer's market this past weekend, as I was waiting for my wife to gather our grocery bags to go shopping. I have written before about how mesmerizing the "abstract cacophony" of shimmering reflections off car's hoods and hubcaps are to a photographer's eye 😊 What is hard to express in words (though I'm obviously trying, obliquely), is how joyful these few minutes' worth of prancing back and forth in-between park cars inevitably are to my soul (I look forward to my "light prancing" almost as much as the delicious recipes my wife cooks up with what we gather at the market!) My only regret (as usual) is that all I had with me was an iPhone.

"Light makes photography.
Embrace light.
Admire it.
Love it.
But above all, know light.
Know it for all you are worth,
and you will know
the key to photography."

- George Eastman (1854 - 1932)

Communicating the Joys of Doing Photography - Part 2

“Nothing is ever the same twice because
everything is always gone forever,
and yet each moment has
infinite photographic possibilities.”
- Michael Kenna (1954 - )

A few months ago, I wrote about five of my favorite "Youtuber" photographers whose channels I go back to again and again, and whose notifications of a new video always put a smile on my face as they pop up on my iPhone: Henry Turner, Thomas Heaton, Nigel Danson, Simon Booth, and Gary Gough. In that earlier post, I alluded to other photographers that have caught my eye - and who certainly deserve equal attention - but about whom I had not yet (at the time) written because I had only just recently "discovered" their channels and was still in the process of learning more about them, their styles, approaches, and photography portfolios. Well, having now done precisely that, I unveil an additional trio of preternaturally talented "photography storytellers" (as I referred to those in part 1): Simon Baxter, Adam Gibbs, and Steve O'nions.

All three share the same exemplary core characteristics I ascribed to the photographers highlighted in part 1: (1) they are all magnificent photographers, in the purest sense of the word; i.e., if they did nothing but stare into a camera each week and pull up whatever new images they produced since their last video, their video posts would still be a privilege to view; (2) although their channels are mostly landscape oriented, their artistic sensibilities and repertoires run considerably deeper; and (3) they all have a gift for story telling and for expressing their obvious love of being out in nature and capturing its beauty. Apart from these similarities, of course, each of them also offers a unique - and uniquely insightful - perspective on doing photography:

Simon Baxter lives and works as a professional photographer in North Yorkshire in England, is the winner of the Light on the Land category in Outdoor Photographer of the Year, and was a featured photographer On Landscape Magazine. His particular specialty is woodland photography - indeed, he is arguably the first "woodland photographer" on YouTube! - but to call Simon's gift a "specialty" hardly does justice to the extraordinary art Simon's eye and soul create. I challenge you to look at Simon's portfolio without: (1) having your proverbial jaw drop at some of the finest woodland photographs you'll ever see (yes, they are that good!); and (2) having your proverbial jaw drop a second time after you realize that Simon's images have literally changed how you will now look at "trees" - and at nature, in general, with your camera  - ever again (yes, his images are that good!). Beyond - or better, behind - Simon's superlative photography is his gentle manner and presence, the quiet but articulate cadence of his speech, and the soulful timeless wisdom that he imparts to lucky viewers of his channel. Simon is of a rare breed of photographer who is equally adept at transforming the "ordinary" into something transcendently magical with his eye/camera, as he is at helping aspiring and seasoned photographers alike forge their own path towards "seeing" and "expressing" their own vision.

“To me, photography is an art of observation.
It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…
I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see
and everything to do with the way you see them.”
- Elliott Erwitt (1928 - ) 

Adam Gibbs, a landscape photographer I "discovered" after seeing him featured on one of Simon Baxter's videos, lives and devotes many - though by no means all - of his videos to photo safaris on Vancouver Island, Canada; his YouTube channel contains playlists that include Antarctica, the Canadian Rockies, China, and Scotland (among many other places). Apart from this geographic versatility, what sets Adam apart is his ability to draw the viewer into his "aesthetic thought space." While other photographer/Youtubers have a gift for narrative (starting with any of the other artists on my two "best of" lists), and are able to bring the viewer along on an adventure using both words and images, Adam also unassumingly - and oh, so gracefully - injects the viewer into his inner machinations, sharing his thought processes on how he "sees" a place, how he makes his compositional choices, and/or what post-processing tools he uses (or intends to use) to bring out the full aesthetic potential of a given scene. He is never rushed and is ever-so-deliberate - Zen-like, one might say - in his pacing and approach to setting up a shot. I also much appreciate the "before and after" fashion in which he unveils his images: the viewer is first shown what the unprocessed raw file looks like after the image is captured, followed with a reveal of the cropped-and-edited final image. This simple narrative schema lays bare (but makes no less mysterious) the artistic transmogrification of initial impressions and intent into a completed image. Gibbs is a master craftsman/artist teacher.

“In large measure, becoming an artist
consists of learning to accept yourself,
which makes your work personal,
and in following your own voice,
which makes your work distinctive.”
- David Bayles (1952 - ) and Ted Orland (1941 - )
Art & Fear

Steve O'nions is an amateur (mostly, film) photographer who lives in Wales, where by using the term "amateur" I wish only to convey that Steve does not make his living from photography (though, given the growing number of subscribers to his channel, that may soon change!), and not that his skill set is any less than expected of a "professional" of the highest level; indeed, if judged on his skill set alone, Steve is in a class by himself. I have been voraciously soaking up his YouTube posts ever since I stumbled upon one of his earliest videos about - what else (for photographers)? - Waiting for the Light during an autumn photo safari back in 2016. I was immediately struck (right from the start) by two patterns that have held true for the 50 or so videos that I've enjoyed since: (1) Steve's sparse, knowledgeable, to-the-point narratives and, on occasion, pedagogic demonstrations of technique, are simply a delight to experience (though, like all great masters, he makes things seem easy; to get to Steve's level one needs patience, practice, and a lot of time!), and (2) where most fine-art photographers profess a disdain for focusing on gear rather than the art the gear is designed to help create, Steve takes it to the next level: the gear is both most and least relevant to the contextualized vision he brings to a given shoot. Steve uses (and is equally adept at using) myriad kinds of cameras that range from old 35mm film cameras, to 4-by-5 and 8-by-10 large format, to micro-four-thirds digital cameras (among many others). But he doesn't stop there: is it black and white film or is it color, and what kind of film is it? Is it Hasselblad or Bronica? Yet, throughout all of his saunter-adventures and camera and film comparisons, Steve's focus is always on the image. Other photographers talk about how one must never lose sight of the forest for the trees (literally and figuratively); Steve shows you how this is done. In the best possible sense, Steve is a wonderful throw-back to artists of yesteryear. Give him a camera and some film - just about any camera and any film - and Steve will show you what fine-art photography is all about. (And all this is without even mentioning his unparalleled compositional skills and his wonderfully dry sense of sardonic, often self-deprecating, humor!)

As I said in my closing paragraph the first time around, you do not have to take my word that these three "photographer storytellers" are among the very best at communicating the joys of photography on their YouTube channels; just follow the links and enjoy the journey! The only down-side of watching so many videos of these accomplished photographer/story-tellers/teachers is that it leaves even less time to go out and do photography 😊

Poetic Truth

"To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Postscript. In full disclosure, and unlike the "fabricated" (and eventually retracted Tweet by) physicist Étienne Klein - who playfully claimed that a photograph he took of a slice of chorizo taken against a black background was that of Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope - the image above is emphatically not a photograph of some spectacular celestial object! It is, in fact, just a Minor-White-like "poetic truth" rendering of ice-on-asphalt, bathed-in-red-light, as "seen" at some point a few months ago during a winter walk during sunset 😊

Things Are What They Are

"Please remember: things are not what they seem."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )

"Things are not as they seem.
They are what they are."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015) 

"But one needs to bear in mind
that things are not always what they seem and,
contrary to the dead stillness of a photograph,
reality is in a state of perpetual flux."

- Audur Ava Olafsdottir (1958 - )  

New Eyes

"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

...

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new sights,
but in looking with new eyes

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Remembrance of Things Past

Communicating the Joys of Doing Photography

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses
what one feels, in the deepest sense,
about what is being photographed.”
- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

To my ever-patient readers, I will dispense with my usual (and likely tiresome) "excuses" for yet another prolonged period of inactivity on my blog. Suffice to say, that photography is something I am able to pursue only as time - i.e., "day job" constraints - allow; and to which I look forward to soon returning. But this is not to say that the pleasures of photography are ever far from my mind (or soul); even as the making of photographs goes through the inevitable crests and troughs of daily realities. It is in this spirit that I offer not one of my own recent photographs (since there are none I dare share), but instead introduce - and provide links to - a few prodigiously talented YouTube photographers/storytellers that I'm sure my kind readers would enjoy spending some quality time with. By "talented," I mean that these photographers are not just gifted artists (something that is immediately obvious by looking at their online portfolios), but that they all possess a preternatural gift of (seemingly effortlessly) conveying the joy of doing photography through visual narrative. As I wallow in my current state of creative non-being, I have repeatedly turned to these "YouTubers" for inspiration, solace, and the simple pure pleasure of immersing myself in beautiful imagery. (To be clear: though I sense a deep creative kinship with each of these storytellers, I do not know nor have I ever met any of them, except through the videos and portfolios they post online.)

So, who are these magnificent "aesthetic storytellers"? I follow about a dozen or so photographers on YouTube (and there are certainly many more that deserve attention), but the ones whose channels I go back to again and again - and why I always smile when my iPhone notifies me that a new video has been posted - are: Henry Turner, Thomas Heaton, Nigel Danson, Simon Booth, and Gary Gough. 

First and foremost, these are all magnificent photographers, in the purest sense of the word; i.e., if they did nothing but stare into a camera each week and pull up whatever new images they produced since their last video, it would still be a privilege to view. But each of them does so much more (as explained below). Overall, their channels are mostly landscape oriented (which is easy to understand, since they all live in the U.K. and are within easy reach of the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and the Isle of Skye, among other spectacular places), but it would be foolish to blindly categorize the imagery that any of these photographers produce as "just landscapes," for their artistic sensibilities and repertoires run considerably deeper.

"Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling.
If you can't feel what you're looking at,
then you're never going to get others to
feel anything when they look at your pictures."
- Don McCullin (1935 - ) 

Turner, who is my favorite (for reasons I'll immediately explain), has a bit less experience than some of the others in this esteemed group (Turner posted his first video only four years ago, while Heaton's first is seven years old and Gough's eight), but - my oh my - what a God-given gift Turner has to inspire even time- and weather-beaten old photographers such as myself (for whom straggling down a short slope at a local park to get to a "shot" depends more on the state of my 61yo knees than how good the shot is that I think I might get!). Turner's joy of photography - his utter delight in just being out and about in nature, hiking, exploring, doing photography (or, sometimes, just looking, with his camera still in the bag) - infuses each and every frame of the videos he posts. He comes across as a genuinely unassuming, humble and creative soul; his instinctive reaction to beauty appears deeply visceral (on at least one occasion, I recall seeing him shed a tear because of what he was "seeing"). His infectious enthusiasm for being/reveling in nature is utterly mesmerizing and intoxicating (in a good way)! I challenge you to watch any of Henry's videos without discovering a smile on your face, and finding yourself in a relaxed, meditative state of mind after seeing his trademark signoff - "Out!" - at the end. Turner is an impassioned, sometimes humorously self-deprecating, master photographer and storyteller; and his stunning videos are experiential wonders. A few of my favorites are: Isle-of-Sky, Stop complaining about the conditions, and What landscape photography gives.

Heaton is the first "YouTuber" I became a devoted follower of a few years ago, and - as is true for the others in this group - I rarely miss any of his episodes. He is both a consummate photographer and an experienced, and creative, YouTuber. Indeed, I am often left in awe at the care he takes in putting together and editing his videos. All are masterful, and are a treat to experience. His 2021 two-part series recounting his north-to-south hike on Scotland's Isle-of-Skye (part 1 and part 2) is one of my personal favorites. Heaton is as comfortable - and gifted at - capturing "Wagnerian" epic like vistas, the likes of which most of us will never get to see (simply because we lack the will or stamina, or both, to trek up some mountainside hours before a glorious sunrise reveals itself at its peak!), as he is at finding quiet abstract compositions of nothing but sand on some otherwise nondescript beach.

"Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field."
- Peter Adams

Danson, who started his channel about five years ago, has a quiet and inviting demeanor. The relaxing tone of his voice and cadence gently lulls you into a creatively receptive state of mind, as he explores the practice and philosophy of what it means to "do photography." Endearingly, he is often accompanied on his "adventures" by his adorable English Springer Spaniel, Pebbles. (Equally endearing, at least to me, is that Danson and I share a love of physics: Danson's Ph.D. is in optics, mine is in complex systems.) While Danson is a superlative all-around landscape photographer (and founded the World Landscape Photographer competition in 2020), his work with trees is among the most accomplished I've ever seen. A few favorites: woodland photography, trees of scotland, and woodland photography tips.

Simon Booth, whose channel I have only recently "discovered" (but who has been uploading video content for five years), is both a landscape and wildlife photographer with over 30 years experience. Like Danson, he a scientist; specifically, an ecologist. His research interests often play an integral part in his adventures, as he uses his scientific knowledge to help guide his aesthetic choices. Dedicated viewers of his channel learn as much about the flora and fauna of the places he saunters in as they do about the creative process. His graceful unassuming manner belies a keen eye for composition. If ever there was a photographer who can find a photograph where others see nothing - with the magical ability to transform (what to most people's eyes, even to other photographer's eyes, is) an "uninteresting" leaf or fungus into an otherworldly, exquisitely beautiful image - it is Simon. He is a master of turning the "ordinary" into the extraordinary! A few of my favorite Simon Booth videos are: hidden gems, summer photography, and looking beyond the obvious.

"Don’t shoot what it looks like.
Shoot what it feels like."
- David Alan Harvey (1944 - )

Gough is a landscape, commercial, wedding, and portrait photographer, though his YouTube channel is focused mainly on landscape. What I love about Gough's videos is an amalgam of what I admire about what all five of my favorite YouTube photographers do so well. He is a talented artist, unassuming and unarrogant, knowledgeable about the art and craft of photography, takes his work seriously but not always himself doing it, and is a wonderful story teller. Gough is also a dedicated experimentalist, by which I mean that he often injects an element of "play" into his photography; such as when he recently challenged a $20 (old, old, so very old) camera to taking long exposures, combined wide-angle and telephotos shots of a railroad track and train into a single image, and discussed shooting landscapes in poor light. Gary's channel also include wonderful video tutorials on myriad specific topics; watching them is akin to being part of a master workshop (albeit, remotely, observing and learning, but - alas - unable to interact; and Gary's cheerful and inviting "video personality" certainly makes one want to engage with on a personal level). 

It is often said (as evidenced by the quotes above) that what distinguishes a "fine art" photographer from someone who merely takes "snapshots" is (in part) the ability to create an image that shows the viewer not just the "thing" or "place" the photographer was looking at, but to convey what the photographer experienced, emotionally (even spiritually) while engaged in the creative process that led to capturing the image. Each of the YouTubers introduced above shines in this regard! They all have a gift for story telling and for expressing their obvious love of being out in nature and capturing its beauty. YouTube may even be the perfect medium for communicating what it feels like to do photography, since it directly shows the photographer in his or her element; provided, of course, that there is something worth communicating, and that the photographer is skilled in doing so. YouTube provides a powerful new channel through which a special group of artists - those who are skilled equally in image making and storytelling - can engage with their followers; not by just showing them finished products of their work, but by taking viewers along with them on the walks (or hikes) the photographers themselves went on as they find and create their images. But you do not have to take my word that these five "photographer storytellers" are among the very best at communicating the joys of photography on their YouTube channels; just follow the links and enjoy the journey! 😊

Celestial Light

“Celestial light, shine inward...
that I may see and tell of things
invisible to mortal sight.”

- John Milton (1608 - 1674)

“When you touch the celestial in your heart,
you will realize that the beauty of your soul
is so pure, so vast and so devastating that
you have no option but to merge with it.
You have no option but to feel the rhythm
of the universe in the rhythm of your heart.”

- Amit Ray (1960 - )

Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

Postscript. This is (for now) the last of my recent "celestial leaves" series. In the context of "creative process," I thought it worth mentioning how these images came to be. As with 90%+ of my photographs, very little forethought went into them; at least, initially. After picking up the Sunday paper from the bottom of our driveway, turning and heading back to the house, I noticed a small shriveled leaf - perhaps two inches long or so (and that I couldn't immediately identify) - lying just off to the side of our walkway. I was mesmerized by its delicately translucent veins and patterns. The weathered leaf had clearly been "sitting" around for quite some time, as evidenced by its many rips and tears, and splotches of dirt and fungus. Still, in my mind's eye, it was radiantly beautiful. I knew instinctively that I needed to try to capture its essence. I had "pictured" it almost exactly as shown above (in what is effectively a digital negative, to highlight its luminescent quality), and as each of the other recent images appear. Despite a valiant effort to find similar-looking "dilapidated leaves" (including a 2 hour dedicated mini-hike around the woodlands in our neighborhood!), I managed to find only three others; which my wife finally identified as belonging to a simple hosta bush. But the real story as far as the "creative process" goes is just this: that one's muse prods when she will, on her own schedule; and that we must always be attuned to our muse's musings. I had nary a thought to whip out my macro lens to take still-lifes of dilapidated leaves this past Sunday morning; heck, I strolled out for the paper even before my first coffee! But that numinous little "celestial leaf" that I noticed by chance (or, better, that my muse's own eye wisely led me to) eventually - and happily - consumed my creative energies for days afterward 😊

Mathematical Beauty

"The harmony of the
world is made manifest
in Form and Number,
and the heart and soul
and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are
embodied in the concept
of mathematical beauty."

- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)

Postscript. As may be the case with many of you, my day-job constraints leave me precious little time to devote to purely aesthetic pleasures (notwithstanding those that occasionally overlap with more mathematical pursuits). Sometimes, as now, even my weekend time is filled mostly with staring at gibberish on a computer screen, and pounding away at my keyboard to produce picture-less reams of technical reports (even as I day-dream of month-long photo-safaris in far-away lands). Thus, the short walks my wife and I take through our neighborhood after breakfast each day have become immeasurably important physical and spiritual oases for me. The simple pleasure of encountering beautifully haphazard arrangements of natural forms rejuvenates and nourishes my soul. The images in the triptych above were taken no more than a few minutes apart during a walk that itself lasted less than a half hour. But what a joy it is to stumble upon such humble transcendent beauty hiding in plain sight! The great polymath Thompson's book, On Growth and Form (the first edition of which came out in 1917, and which to this day remains an extraordinarily beautiful book to read) is essentially a 1100+ page erudite argument that biology can be reduced to mathematics (a sentiment that a much younger version of myself would have been happy to accept): "It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. It is but the slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that we can hope to have until the physicist and the mathematician shall have made these problems of ours their own." For those of you interested in exploring (taking a deep-dive, really, into) the broader entanglement of art and science, here are some slides I used for a 2017 presentation at a Humanities and Technology Association conference (held that year in Newport, RI). This lecture is one of three I've given in (relatively) recent years during which I wore both of my hats, as physicist and photographer. The other two lectures were given at the American Center for Physics (College Park, MD in 2009) and at the Morrison House (Alexandria, VA in 2011).

Kandinskian Cacophonies - Part II

"It seems to me that we live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like."

-  William Golding (1911 - 1993)

Postscript. Regular followers of my blog will have noticed by now my recent focus on "leaves in ice"  abstract-like compositions. Of course, most of this has to do with the fact that the seasonal weather (in northern VA) has just not allowed any other kind of photography. But another important reason is that the morning walks my wife and I have been regularly taking through our neighborhood since the start of the (seemingly, never ending) pandemic have over time uncovered a kind of aesthetic bestiary that I've learned to both appreciate and revel in. Quiet little scenes that would normally be "invisible" (literally, since there are parts of our neighborhood I've rarely been in before we started our walks) have gradually revealed themselves - and their compositional possibilities - to me; microcosms of an ethereal beauty all their own. I hesitated taking "real" photographs for a long while (apart from a few quick snapshots with my iPhone). While the natural galleries of haphazardly arranged Kandinskian forms and colors  mesmerized and fascinated me (and, obviously, have continued to do so), I was unsure of my ability to find compositions in such "busy and confusing" cacophonous worlds. But after each walk ended, and my work day got started, I soon noticed myself thinking more and more about lost opportunities. And so, eventually, inevitably, I succumbed to the creative process. I embraced the cacophony. These kinds of compositions - in which multiple elements (mostly form and color; less so, luminance) compete for attention - have never come easily to me, but when they work, they are very satisfying 😊. This is also one of those times that I especially miss my dad, the artist, without whom - and without whose aesthetic sage wisdom - I have now been for 20 years (as of this March). His eye for these kinds of compositions was second to none, with perhaps Kandinsky being the sole exception (and to whose art the New York Times once traced my dad's aesthetic lineage).