Author: brenda

lens-artists: alone time

A freshly-opened cherry bud … her lips upon the flute. She leans in the corner of the balcony: the night is chill, her silken robes are thin, her fingers cold . . . but music floats through the frosty woods and startled plums fall pattering down. ~Chang Hsien (Ed. various. The Jade Flute, The Project Gutenberg eBook)

The general sense impressions I have of “alone times” are moments of grief and loss as well as feelings similar to forlorn, isolated, lonely.

if there’s a house
standing alone, sure enough…
plum blossoms ~Issa (www.haikuguy.com)

I have often pondered a different sense of “alone” after learning of it’s origins; Middle English, “all one.”

“All one” speaks to me of a time of solitary; a sense of completion, wholeness, self-direction, and freedom.

Leya’s Alone Time

yearning for the green of spring

. . . The caged bird longs for the fluttering of high leaves.

The fish in the garden pool languishes for the whirled water

Of meeting streams.

. . . ~T’ao Yuan-ming – AD 365–427 – (Once More Fields and Gardens)*

Yearning

Leica D-Lux 7: f/2.8 . 1/125 . 34 mm

*Trans: Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fir-Flower Tablets

lens-artists: bringing softness

The above autumn image was a raw photograph created in Fujifilm X-T4 with a film simulation recipe, Retro Red.*

Within Capture One 23, I did a bit of light and shadow adjustment, cropped and removed some leaves, and set clarity at 2.

The image on the left was further edited with a Capture One preset, DF-03-Arapaho (bright).

I then hopped over to Color Efex 4 Pro and added a glamour glow layer to create a light softness to the image.

This week Bren invites photographers to explore editing softness into their creative work. I hope you enjoy.

*FujiXWeekly app