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 😊

Structure of Life

"The soul hungers for expression and ceaselessly strives for an understanding of all that comprises the cosmos. The more of beauty in the mind, the more of peace in the spirit. Time is a definite and moving quantity – conserve it! The structure of life we build for ourselves determines the color of our soul. Think more of yourself, realize your duty to yourself, and your duty to those who shall come after you, who shall shape their lives on your influence. Develop the sense of inner beauty and majesty of Nature."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Letters & Images

Graceful Curves

"The study of the pictures of the old masters will show how much they thought of the linear composition, and I hope by some examples of modern photography to show that the value has been appreciated by the producer of them. For the benefit of the tyro I will quote some authorities which go back several centuries. To quote from Hogarth: 'Curved lines are the most beautiful. Nature displays herself in curves; even the straight pine trunk only acts as a foil to the graceful curves of the branches. Therefore, curves should predominate in a picture and where a straight line is introduced it should only be used as a foil to accent the beauty of the curve.'"

- G. Hanmer Croughton (1843 - 1920)
Abel's Photographic Weekly, Volume 20

Another World

"We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.

...

We lack - we need - a term for those places where one experiences a 'transition' from a known landscape... into 'another world': somewhere we feel and think significantly differently. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, recline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographics, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within counties.

...

Landscape... can 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in."

- Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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 - )  

Atoms with Consciousness

"I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves…
mountains of molecules, each stupidly
minding its own business… trillions apart…
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages…
before any eyes could see…
year after year…
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?…
on a dead planet,
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest…
tortured by energy…
wasted prodigiously by the sun…
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules
 repeat the patterns of one another
 till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves…
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things,
masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing
a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land…
here it is standing…
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea…
wonders at wondering…
...I…
a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Untitled Ode to the Wonder of Life,
Quoted by Maria Popova (1984 - ), The Marginalian

Vedantic Complementarity

"The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively."

- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

"The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microscopic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally perceives the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes."

- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

"The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object."

- Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)

Mysterious Animal

"In sixteenth-century South America, the name [Carbuncle, from the Latin carbunculus , ‘a little coal’] was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal - mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ 

Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness - two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan - with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies: 'It is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.'

Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (As You Like It, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’  Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he never found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Book of Imaginary Beings

Act of Perception

"Although our modern way of thinking has, of course, changed a great deal relative to the ancient one, the two have had one key feature in common: i.e. they are both generally ‘blinkered’ by the notion that theories give true knowledge about ‘reality as it is’. Thus, both are led to confuse the forms and shapes induced in our perceptions by theoretical insight with a reality independent of our thought and our way of looking.

...

The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.

...

Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement...It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony of fitting between mind and matter."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Light and Dark

"There's beauty in every tree and every bush.

Just take the time to look at'em.
...
Put light against light -
you have nothing.
Put dark against dark -
you have nothing.
 It's the contrast of light and dark
that each gives the other one meaning.
...
We have no limits to our world.
We're only limited by our imagination.
"

- Bob Ross (1942 - 1995)
Happy Little Accidents

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

Simple Secret

"And now here is my secret,
a very simple secret:
it is only with the heart that
one can see rightly,
what is essential is
invisible to the eye."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944)

Tonic of Wildness

"We need the tonic of wildness...
At the same time that we are earnest
to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things
be mysterious and unexplorable,
that land and sea be indefinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed
by us because unfathomable.
We can never have
enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Shapes, Lines, Curves, and Solids

"The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system."

- David Berlinski (1942 - ) 

Primordial Purity

"The master replied: Tsogyal, the
empty essence of your awareness
is not created by anyone.
Without causes and conditions,
it is originally present.
Don't try to change
or alter awareness.
Let it remain exactly as it is!
Thus you will be free
from straying and awaken
within the state of
primordial purity."

- Padmasambhava (c. 8th - 9th centuries)
Advice from the Lotus-Born

Geometric Patterns

"Every place is given its
character by certain patterns of
events that keep on happening there.
These patterns of events
are locked in with certain
geometric patterns in the space.
...
"I believe that all centers
that appear in space -
whether they originate in biology,
in physical forces, in pure geometry,
in color - are alike simply in that
 they all animate space.
 It is this animated space that
has its functional effect
 upon the world, that determines
 the way things work, that governs
 the presence of harmony and life.
...
"All space and matter,
organic or inorganic,
has some degree of life in it,
and matter/space is more alive
or less alive according to
its structure and arrangement."

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)

Beauty Everywhere

"A line is a dot that went for a walk."
- Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)

"Try to walk as much as you can,
and keep your love for nature,
for that is the true way to learn
to understand art more and more.
Painters understand nature and
love her and teach us to see her.
If one really loves nature,
one can find beauty everywhere."
- Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

"The whole world is an

art gallery when you're mindful.
There are beautiful things
everywhere and they're free."
- Charles Tart (1937 - )

Form of Forms

"Thought is the thought of thought.
Tranquil brightness.
The soul is in a manner all that is:
the soul is the form of forms.
Tranquility sudden, vast,
candescent: form of forms."

- James Joyce (1882 - 1941) 

Electromagnetic Phenomena

"We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models. Over time, this approach gave him a deep-seated intuition into electromagnetic phenomena. It enabled him to ask questions that had not occurred to others, to devise experiments that no one else had thought of, and to see possibilities that others had missed. He thought boldly but would never commit himself to an opinion until it had withstood the most rigorous experimental testing. As he explained in a letter to Ampère: I am unfortunate in a want to mathematical knowledge and the power of entering with facility any abstract reasoning. I am obliged to feel my way by facts placed closely together."

-  Nancy Forbes (1952 - 2021)
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field 

Like a Wave from the Ocean

We do not "come into" this world;
we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples."
Every individual is an expression
 of the whole realm of nature,
a unique action of the total universe.
...
The only way to make sense
out of change is to plunge into it,
move with it, and join the dance.
...
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water,
because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
...
You are a function of what
the whole universe is doing
in the same way that a wave
is a function of what the
whole ocean is doing."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Action Potential

"At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional."

- Ken Liu (1976 - )
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Diffusing Into the Air

"See yonder leafless tree against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And ever subdividing separate,
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,
As if they loved the element, & hasted
To dissipate their being into it."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Collected Poems and Translations

Light All Around

"My first memory is of light,
the brightness of light,
light all around."

-  Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

"No one lights a lamp in order
to hide it behind the door:
the purpose of light is to
create more light, to open
people's eyes, to reveal
the marvels around."

- Paulo Coelho (1947 - )

"Whether in the intellectual pursuits
of science or in the mystical pursuits
of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and
the purpose surging in our nature responds."

-  Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)

Maximizing Play

"In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way."

-  George Leonard (1923 - 2010)

Higher Dialectic

"The efficient or motive principle, which is not merely the analysis but the production of the several elements of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half attainment of it, as its goal. But the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically. Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of selfconscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
Science of Logic

Transient Beauty

"The wabi sabi aesthetic ideals which have been employed not just in the tea ceremony but in nearly every form of Japanese artistic expression, have come to represent a bridge between the trappings of the material world and the pull we all feel, to a greater or lesser extent, to a life of austerity and simplicity. If the spirit is ready and willing, then a three-line haiku poem set in the tokonoma (the traditional alcove), complemented by a simple yet perfectly balanced flower arrangement, should be sufficient to push the viewer's awareness to new heights and to help him or her find a serene balance between the joy of life and the inevitability of the waiting void.

...

Wabi sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty on the impermanence of things."

- Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence

The Watcher Joins the River

 

"Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great
flood and runs over rocks
from the basement of time.
On some of the rocks are
timeless raindrops. Under the
rocks are the words, and some
of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
...
I sat there and forgot and forgot,
until what remained was the river
that went by and I who watched...
Eventually the watcher joined the river,
and there was only one of us.
I believe it was the river."

- Norman Maclean (1902 - 1990)

A River Runs Through it and Other Stories

Inner Sound

“Form itself, even if completely abstract ...

has its own inner sound.”

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

“This idea that there is generality in the

specific is of far-reaching importance.”

- Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“A map is not the territory it represents, but,
if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory,
which accounts for its usefulness.”

- Alfred Korzybski (1879 - 1950)
Science and Sanity

Secret of the Sea

"My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

"Time is more complex near
the sea than in any other place,
for in addition to the circling
of the sun and the turning
of the seasons, the waves
beat out the passage of time
on the rocks and the tides rise
and fall as a great clepsydra."

- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

Like Lichen on Rock

"Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still.

A dot appears, a flesh-flake.
It swells like a balloon; it moves,
circles, slows, and vanishes.

This is your life."

- Annie Dillard (1945 - )
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Spiritual Experience

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience.
You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Knowing Nothing of Space

 "We do not know space.

We do not see it,

we do not hear it,

we do not feel it.

We are standing in the middle of it,

we ourselves are part of it,

but we know nothing about it."

- M.C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Loosely Conjoined Cells of a Tissue

"A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

...

Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship."

- Lewis Thomas (1913 - 1993)
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

Listen When the Mind is Quiet

"I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding.

Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.

When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain"

- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

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! 😊

Web of Time

"This web of time, the
strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate,
intersect or ignore each
other through the centuries,
embraces every possibility.
We do not exist in most of them.
In some you exist and not I,
while in others I do,
and you do not"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones 

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 😊

Living Centers

"What is the life that we discern in things?"
...

"Each of us has an eternal self—a best self—an “I” that goes beyond what we normally see. This is what allows us to contact the 'living centers' in ourselves, in others, and in spaces that come alive for us. This field of centers, that appears in things, people, events, places shows us our interconnectedness…and can be called God or Spirit manifest. Everything we do and make, then, is a gift to IT. Good things grow and unfold out of our understood wholeness."

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground

Cosmic Tree

"The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
Psychological Types