Saguaro Wanderings: Seeing 2010 (#29)

Two offerings for you consideration, two examples of Macro photography illustrating a powerful contrast both in hue and form and chaos versus parallelism.

The first, taken around midnight, is an extreme closeup of quite weathered paint on the side of a building in Alviso. Photographed under low-pressure sodium street lighting (which gave a distinct and highly-saturated yellow-orange cast), this version has been converted to black & white in order to place emphasis on form and texture as opposed to surreal coloration. The setting for this scene was fascinating: two buildings, side by side and architecturally sharing the same simplistic design, were also apparently of approximately the same age . . . yet one of the structure's paint job was in nearly pristine condition while its neighbor's coating suggested that perhaps the unit had been recently returned from a lengthy stint in a time machine. It was this striking contradiction in their surface conditions which drew my attention to the buildings.

The second entry is a simple study of the elegant, graceful and surprisingly complex patterns which are ubiquitous in the nature which daily surrounds us, if we'd only slow down long enough notice. This leaf, humbling living out its brief existence just beyond my residence's stair case, caught my eye by its privileged and lucky position in a ray of sun just before sunset. I dashed upstairs to grab my camera and tripod (necessary for most extreme macro work) and just barely managed to set up and capture this before the direct lighting illuminating the veins vanished.

This latter image displays one of my favorite compositional themes, that being the irony of how a relatively tiny portion of the canvas can grab attention so as to become the main subject of an image . . . in this case, the scar, the arc of which also nicely echoes and reinforces the many similar trajectories of the leaf's arteries and broader outlines. The background leaf provides a solid anchor and balance to the scene, establishing depth and repeating the overall symmetries throughout.

* * *