Tag Archives: Photography

January 4, 2024 · 3:43 pm

It might seem counterintuitive, yes, or even disingenuous:

to talk about a 2024 resolution to be less annoying, less grandiose, less showoffy, less of a know it all, and to do it in a blog that showcases me, me, me.

I know. It is true.

And yet, hiking the Fay Canyon trail this morning I can’t help but ponder my resolve, how I might achieve it, and how I might write about it here. And illustrate with my own photos, of course. I might not even have used those words, counterintuitive and disingenuous, incorrectly. But see how I full steam ahead as though I did?

Bear with me.

Juniper, oak and manzanita dominate this forest landscape.

The oaks are different than we have back east. Gambel oaks, Emory oaks. Interesting growth habit, unusual leaves.

Plenty of beauty all around.

I’ve always loved manzanita for its dead and live parts intertwined.

A little way in I come upon my first alligator of the day.

The alligator juniper, magnificent, and even a conjoined specimen, my favorite.

Me, me, me. My favorite, which I’m telling you about here. They’re so hardy, their roots can grow into rock.

Which one is your favorite, though? Slightly less arrogance, slightly more consideration for other people.

Conjoined junipers abound. Husband-and-wife trees, not rare here in Sedona. I’m taking lots of photos.

Hikers pass me on the trail. I overhear snippets of conversation about trees, technology, how many eggs are left in someone’s refrigerator. Should we go out and buy more? says the first. Her companion: Probably not necessary.

The ground underneath the juniper’s branches swims with berries, their blue coated with a fine white powder.

Tell-tale sign of some animal.

Coyote? Fox? Javelina? A person scolded me once for offering a photo of scat in this blog. I love its mystery, though, the story it tells of other creatures in these woods when our human backs are turned. I follow the stream bed, hiking the dry wash.

I reach the end of the trail, the end of the box canyon.

I see a jumble of boulders adorned by the backpack of a human lucky enough to find themselves amid this place’s grandeur.

Another sign of humans, a marker that seems kind of corny and almost quaint in our digital age.

Time to turn around, head back to the parking lot, out of this fantastic realm.

I pass some novel sights along the way.

Hello! I love you. Won’t you tell me your name?

More gorgeous lichen.

Time-roughened bark.

A juvenile specimen.

More old and new, combined in the bark of numerous grizzled junipers.

Oddly, then, my impulse to pursue my goal of less ego, more modesty, becomes replaced as I walk the path along the wash.

I remember another resolution I’ve made, equally powerful: to try to live in the Now.

I reach a little clearing and find myself standing still. Suddenly there are no humans within hearing distance. The only acoustics: birds twittering in the undergrowth and above. I look up.

I scan down the trail, where I’m headed.

I turn my focus back to where I’ve come from.

All around me is such intense beauty.

And I have an epiphany. This, actually, is the Now. This is the only moment.

My feet are suddenly rooted to the sandy ground.

I can’t move. I look around some more.

I start to weep. Look up again, helpless. The morning sky smiles down, my only friend.

Gaze around me.

Everything so quiet, so still, so perfect. Peaceful. Luminous. It’s a kind of active contentment I can’t recall feeling before. My worries about the past and future recede. I know those concerns exist, but they’ve faded to the edges, temporarily invisible.

Can every moment resonate like this one? Can I live in the Now, if not always, then more often? I’m not sure.

I never want to leave this place, this moment. 

After standing there stock still for a while, I remember I said I’d return by a certain time. I move off my sandy perch and head back down the trail. I see some unfamiliar things as I go.

Some details I missed on the way into the canyon.

Pass a few folks laughing, tromping down the trail, having their normal conversations.

I’m back to normal too, but with a powerful feeling I know I’ll carry with me into the Now of 2024.

Should we buy eggs today? Probably not necessary.

What we have to put in our mouths at this moment will do just fine.

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March 15, 2023 · 6:51 pm

A warm and moist hush prevails

in the exhibition area of the New York Botanical Garden’s Annual Orchid Show.

And is there any better kind of hush? Especially on a cold and blustery late winter day in the Bronx.

Orchid lovers endure heart palpitations all around. At least those not too consumed with taking pictures.

Photographers are legion here. So many photo opps, so little time.

Orchids posing throughout the place. You’d think they know they’re beautiful.

Who cares if they are vain? They deserve the attention.

Some amazing specimens here. The cane orchid.

So rare and yet so common.

As Chet Baker has it most cornily in My Funny Valentine:

You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you’re my favorite work of art

I can name them if pressed. Not if the flowers are pressed, I mean if it is desired that I know their names. There is the slipper orchid.

The ghost orchid.

The moth orchid.

Most familiar is the corsage orchid, the one you’ll find at every prom.

But the anonymous ones, or the ones in front of which I am muscled aside by fellow Iphone snappers, are really just as fine.

I can also tell you the orchid’s biological features: the fused male and female parts in one structure, called the column; the solid, sticky masses of pollen, called pollinia; a modified petal called a labellum, which insects use as a landing platform. The lip might be small or large, ridged, ruffled, or pouch-shaped. Somehow it all sounds too sexy. Let’s have some innocent flowers, shall we?

After a turn or two down the humid pathways, Gil asks, “Have we been this way before?”

Who knows? In a haze of orchid splendor, before and after fade. It is total tropical immersion. My head spins. My mind fills with fantasies, dreams, nightmares, poetry. Didn’t a monster grab me last night in my sleep?

There is actually poetry conveniently installed here by the powers that be, verse by Wang Huizhi:

I release my feelings among these hills and streams;

Carefree and detached, I forget all constraints…

If you can tear your eyes away from the petals, NYBG has other treasures. Look up.

Or look down.

A king anthurium hailing from Colombia.

A floss-silk tree, from Peru.

As a break from the sometimes-a-tad-too-sweet orchids, I also like to observe what goes on behind the scenes. The vegetation trash in a bin.

Staff gardeners comparing notes.

All around above our heads there is a sound… kind of like birdsong. Are there birds in here? asks a woman, focusing her camera above at the staghorn fern.

Also, what is that thing? I tell her there is a label, it’s a staghorn fern. Oh, she says, I think it’s the sound of the wind.

Go through the flame-draped tunnel…

And you will find… more orchids.

I like my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while, says Gil, quoting Groucho Marx.

Yes, there are a lot of orchids here.

Strangely, it turns out we know the young lady who “designed” the show.

She is the daughter of an old friend, and I happen to know that her big brother is named Huckleberry. She did a great job here.

Along the way it is possible to learn that the most rare color for orchids is blue. But I see no blue orchid among the thousands here. I ask a security guard, Have you seen a blue orchid here?

No, he says helpfully. But I think there’s one at the library. In a pot. Nice idea, but then we’d have to take ourselves out of the fragrant sauna into the cold gale outside. We’ll stick to the fleshy white ones here.

Eventually it is necessary to exit. You like orchids?… Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption. That’s from the noir classic The Big Sleep.

The gift shop offers johnny jump ups, a welcome respite from the orchidium.

And… more orchids, of the 24-dollar variety.

Let’s pretend orchids are really as special as they seem to think they are.

They deserve the glory.

At least once a year.

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December 17, 2022 · 6:48 pm

Dreamscape

is the best word to describe the remarkable images photographer Patrick Tierney captures while roaming around his native Los Angeles.

Mainly in the dark.

Many of his subjects project a kind of glow from the inside.

Makes me think of the creepy Tom Waits song: What’s He Building In There? Often featured, something I love, vernacular signage.

Pat Tierney knows every inch of South Bay in general and Torrance in particular, Quentin-Tarantino territory. He has talked about how he was inspired in his youth in a conversation he had with Eric Saks, his co-director on the amazing film Don From Lakewood. “When I was a child, I had these vivid memories of atmosphere and mood, just these pleasurable memories of place and time when I was alone.”

“I was an infant, and I was in my crib on the front drive. My mom was washing dishes watching me. The wind was coursing through this stand of bamboo. For some reason, it was so pleasurable, I never forgot it, and I think of it even now.”

About walking home from school: “All the fathers’ cars were at work, and the streets were empty. If you can look at it from today’s perspective, it looked like an empty movie lot, the whole neighborhood. In the middle of the day it was long shadows and houses, sterile, new tract homes, lit by these long shadows. There were Japanese gardeners silently working in the flower beds, and I would see one or two. Just this whole quietude, no cars on the street. The mothers were all inside doing housekeeping. It struck me, it was ecstatic.”

A lot of his current work focuses on light industry or fast food places or gas stations.

But also questionable residential areas.

Don’t know about you, but I find the images thrillingly mysterious.

“These scenes are silent and lonely,” he says. “It’s this sweet quietude.”

Someone give this man a show, or publish his work, or something! He deserves it.

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April 26, 2022 · 8:03 pm

My father fell for an orchid

late in life. It was a simple series of white flowers on a stem, nothing fancy, yet he insisted that it accompany him from the hospital to his room in the Care Center. A friend had brought it as a gift, and it somehow spoke to him, he who had never had a thought for plants earlier in his life. Orchids can be magical.

The ones at the New York Botanical Garden’s annual orchid show practically knocked me to the ground.

I was lulled by the piped-in yoga-class soundtrack. Then reawakened again and again by the five greenhouses’ worth of tropical specimens.

How can something be unique yet generic, astoundingly beautiful yet ho-hum, run of the mill? That was my honest assessment of the oxymoronic goods on hand.

The orchids went on and on.

Moth orchids, ghost orchids, slipper orchids, rainbow orchids. Moonlit orchids, which attract nocturnal pollinators, and are also especially fragrant by the light of the moon.

Sugary.

Clownish.

Ever so slightly obscene.

A bit of TMI, thank you very much.

Easy on the signage, New York Botanical Garden horticulturalists! Sometimes I prefer my facts optional, at least when viewing the natural world.

I found myself admiring other living beings in the vicinity, anything not obviously pretty, the ones with thorns, like the South American floss-silk tree.

Or the non-orchid plant that that presented itself in an extraordinary, almost indescribable shade of green – a jade vine, it grows only in the Philippines.

I was drawn to the womb of a tunnel that connected parts of the exhibit.

And my fellow visitors clicking, clicking, clicking, intent on capturing the essence of a particular flower. Human beings, cameras, nature, always fascinating. Note: it is impossible to take a bad picture of an orchid.

Outside, the catkins dangled from the April birch.

A prickly sweetgum seedpod lay nestled in the grass beneath its parent, a sweetgum tree not yet leafed out.

And the equally prickly human being waiting on our bench for the next tram.

The orchids are always going to be splendiferous, whether they come from the supermarket or the Enid Haupt Conservatory show. The ones I saw today made me realize how exquisite everything else is, too.

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