haiku

inspiration: mood

murmur of voices

unheeded by today’s

regrets of yesterday

Nikon D750 f/4 1/400s 42mm 160 ISO

Image submitted for Dogwood Photography’s annual 52-week photography challenge.

Week 9 Inspiration: Mood (Your Artistic Inspiration this week is the mood you are feeling today. Take that mood and use it to create art.)

lens-artist photo challenge: nature

spring breeze–
the pine on the ridge
whispers it ~Issa (www.haikuguy.com)

Horsetooth Reservoir … f/5.6 1/2000s 300mm 2200 ISO

“[Frank Meadow] Sutclifffe rarely left Whitby, where his portrait studio kept him busy, and said that we was ‘tethered for the greater part of each year by a chain, at the most only a mile or two long.’ To most modern photographers this would seem a crippling restriction, but Shutcliffe gradually realized that is was an asset to him as a photographer since it forced him to concentrate on the transitory effects that would transform familiar scenes.” (cited: Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the Aperture History of Photography Series: Aperture 1979

While I dreamed of traveling during those long-hours filled with work and family responsibilities, I find that Frank Shutcliffe’s creative work serves to move me toward greater acceptance of being “tethered” during this retirement period with the challenge to open myself to the “transitory effects” of nature that transforms the landscape close to home.

Image, haiku, and excerpt from Aperture submitted in response to Patti’s (P. A. Moed) lens-artists photo challenge: nature.

katsura nobuko

Wild geese —

between their cries, a slice

of silence ~ Katsura Nobuko (M Ueda, Far Beyond the Field)

Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/2500 s 170 mm 1800 ISO

Katsura Nobuko was born Niwa Nobuko in Osaka, Japan on November 1, 1914. When she was five, she almost died of acute pneumonia. After graduating from Ootemae Girls’ High School, she began writing haiku when the poems in ‘Kikan’ (The flagship) magazine impressed her with their nontraditional style. She subsequently met the magazine’s editor, Hino Soojoo, and became his protege. Her marriage in 1939 changed her family name to Katsura, but her husband died two years later.

Childless, Nobuko returned to her mother’s home. On March 13, 1945, the home caught fire as the American planes bombed Osaka. Unable to put out the fire she gathered her haiku manuscripts before fleeing barefooted. It is said that when she was reunited with her mother, her mother – weeping – said, “You are safe — that’s all I care.” The rescued manuscripts were later published in her first volume, ‘Gekkoo shoo (Beams of the moon 1949).