While working on yesterday’s images, blue in their tint as it was what the Landscapist would label as “entre chien et loup”, I am listening to internet radio. Only recently I got addicted to this vice, after having discovered the wonderful www.wwoz.org, a blues and jazz radio station from New Orleans. Original, traditional blues is played only very rarely here on Germany’s radio stations, so I am more than grateful for this gain.
But I would also like to take up Juhaa’s comment on yesterday’s post regarding literal vs. non-literal photography. For quite a while a would have labeled the majority of my images as purely descriptive, what I would see as literal in the sense of the quote. Unfortunately neither the blog post nor the comments discuss this topic any deeper. But non-literal I would see as having a different, more fundamental statement than the subject matter would describe. And sometimes this is what I want to transport in my images. This is probably a field suitable for an “artistic statement”, but if I could describe it with words I might have become a writer, not a photographer.
I love the blues. I listen to it almost every day. I have satellite radio and it stays on the blues station. I also listen to http://www.pandora.com and http://www.groveshark.com, both of which allow me to choose what I want to listen to.
Regarding this photo: it’s interesting what our eyes see and perceive. When I first looked at this photo and many times after that, my mind was trying to figure out what those two things in the middle were. After quite a long time of ‘knowing’ that they were branches, I couldn’t found anything that told me how they connected to the branches. Finally, I gave up with the left brain and let go. My right brain had seen two birds in flight, following closely, the smaller behind the larger. Both birds, or perhaps a bird and a butterfly, had white wing outlines. Also, I finally figured it out. It is a reflection of the stumps in the water.
For quite a while I saw this image “wrong”, interpreting it so that there was a black-colored bird making a fast turn in the middle. Only then did it “click” and the real image stabilized. Good composition!
@Paul: Thanks for the links to the blues stations, I’ll try it when I have a fast connection again.
Re. the image: yes, it has a certain brain teasing quality. For me it’s hard finding images like this, as I am usually busy with “labelling”, putting forms into boxes, when seeing new sceneries. When going out photographing, the first half hour can be really unproductive because of these inhibitions. But low light, lack of sounds, lack of distractions can help to bring me faster into a flow state, where the eye reacts to the scenery and the labeling intellect is pushed aside.
Unfortunately, pandora doesn’t work from Germany (you gotta love those DRM restrictions, don’t you?). Try last.fm instead, works like a charm…
Great reflections, by the way – for a moment it was really a brain teaser. Afterwards it’s a great, calm winterscene. Nice Blues… 😉