Author: brenda

Riverbend ponds natural area II

Riverbend Pond… Nikon D750 f/4.5 1/125s 85mm 100 ISO

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional…

Koren, Leonard, Wabi-Sabi for artists, designers, poets, & philosophers. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA

inspiration: balanced composition

Week 17 : Balanced composition (is pretty straightforward, unless you are trying to shoot in the “Accidental Renaissance” style. So shoot a balanced image in the Accidental Renaissance style.)

This week’s photo challenge has me stumped. My research of “Accidental Renaissance” style directs me to Reddit’s definition:

  • A photo that accidentally resembles the types of art popular from the 14th-19th centuries.
  • Composition: Triangular/Pyramidial figures, Dynamic, assymetrical composition, foreshortening, and of course the use of the Fibonacci sequence or Golden Ratio
  • Lighting: Featuring use of sfumato (blurring/softening of outlines) and/or chiaroscuro (strong contrasts between light and dark
  • Subject: Landscapes, people, scenes, that feature one or both of the above.

So…these three represent my visualization of balanced images in the Accidental Renaissance style.

This YouTune video is the most “understandable” explanation of the golden ratio I have found.

Images submitted in response to Dogwood Photography’s annual 52-week photography challenge.

attachment to memory

orchids… Sony RX100-3 f/2.8 1/640s 14.9mm 800 ISO

“…to remain alive is to be subject to the grinding force of memory. Day and night the millstone turns, shaping the soul and softening the heart. To some, this going around and around the same subject may seem like emotional paralysis. But there is also something freeing about this attachment to remembrance. One day, one hour, one child, keep cutting through to the present. All other days take shape around this circle of emptiness.” ~V Schwarcz (Bridge Across Broken Time)

Xiangchou (Nostalgia)

Orchid… Sony RX100-3 f/2.8 1/640 25.7 800 ISO

I was a child,
Nostalgia seemed a small stamp:
I was here…
My mother was there.

When I grew up
Nostalgia became a ticket:
I was here…
My bride was there.

Years later,
Nostalgia was a little tomb:
I was outside…
My mother was inside.

And now,
My nostalgia is a shallow strait:
I am at here…
The mainland is there.

~ Yu Guang Zhong

“The Chinese expression for “nostalgia” is xiangchou, literally “village sadness.” …xiangchou describes the grief that accompanies the traveler who cannot find a way back to the home village…[it] is not a geographical predicament but a spiritual state of being. First he finds himself outside the mother as a tiny emblem of apartness, then he is the man who contemplates her tomb. The shallow waters of the Taiwan straits are, similarly, not only a spatial divide between the island and the mainland but a reminder of the longing for, and the impossibility of going back to, ancestral roots.” *

*cited: V Schwarcz (Bridge Across Broken Time)