• clouds,  landscape,  quotes,  reflections

    Reflection…

    Snake River at Oxbow Bend from October of 2003

    Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.

    Huston Smith

    There are those moments when I am touched at some deep level when taking images such as this and, more importantly, the opportunity to witness scenes like this. Photography has allowed me to slow down and experience those sacred moments. Our friend Earl is spot on when he says these moments are transforming and revitalizing. At this stage in my life I ask myself the question, “How much love is actually being shared between me and Nature herself?” Just asking that question now is transformative and revitalizing. I agree when Earl mentions in his post about this chaotic world. Seems to me it is in need of a touch of heaven.

  • Grand Teton National Park,  musings

    Chaos of Nature

    “I chose nature photography as a way of capturing and sharing the beauty, power, and fragility of wild places and the life that inhabits them, so that those who have become mired in the man-made chaos may open their eyes to the real world.”

    Guy Tal

    Earl had a wonderful post a few days ago called Embracing Chaos. In that post Earl states “there is a part of me which exaltates the wonders, energy and unease of chaos.” I totally agree!

    Once I began to really look at this world I noticed the differences in the designs of nature and those of man. As Edward Weston suggests “nature is crude and lacking in arrangement” compared to what man creates. Yet that chaos affects me in a totally different way than mad-made order. I experience a different feeling when looking at briar patchs along a small creek or the twisted and bent cottonwoods rooted along the banks of a river than I do when I see the 15 shrubs (not 16 as one died and has not been replaced yet) planted in a grid pattern around a neon sign in front of the bank. The chaos of nature does not grate against me the way man-made order does.

    These images were taken with my first digital camera, a Nikon D100 and a Nikon 18-35mm or the Nikon 24-85mm lens back in 2003 and 2004. That camera and those lens were instrumental in helping me see and simplify the beauty in the chaos of nature.