Tonight's submission is a simple study of light and shadow, as well as both obvious and subtle compositional symmetries.
It is also the result of what I term a "extemporaneously premeditated" image: without even thinking of photography I spied several of my wife's candle accessories on a white table, brilliantly illuminated by early afternoon sunlight . . . the wonderfully complex shadows cast by these glass pieces belie the superficially perfect smoothness of their ovoid forms. It was this revealing illusion of surface verses content which unexpectedly caught my eye, immediately grabbed my attention, and lead me to deliberately arrange the objects between the coincident slashing hints of the window blinds (the very same which form the basis of Post #100).
Only after taking several versions of this arrangement did it occur to me that this image has its ancestry in my earliest efforts at photography, circa 1973 . . . My very first conscious attempt to create an unexpected and surprising abstraction from an ordinary found object utilized a beautiful, squat blown-glass bottle of my grandmother's, deliberately cracked and featuring a striking continuum of hues from deep red to yellow. On a late afternoon in Tucson I cracked open the front door of my grandparents' house, noted the narrow and blinding vector of sun cutting across the deep green carpet floor, and immediately wondered what it would look like to see the jar's spidery, colored glass shadow imposed upon that surface. The resulting 4"x6" 35mm print came out far better than I'd expected (it resembled a comet streaking across a pea soup sky), and was the genesis of my penchant for abstract imagery derived from ordinary settings.
Votives, #5589
(c)2009 James W. Murray, all rights reserved.
(click image for larger version)
Details: November 21, 2009; Canon 20D; f/11 @ 1/400 sec; -2/3 EV; ISO 200; 31mm.
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Beautiful color and light within an inspiring composition. You are an inspiration!
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