Saguaro Wanderings: Seeing 2010 (#104)

For your consideration: atmospherics.

The first image is a new addition to my Glass Series which can been viewed here. Looking through a painted window, directly into the Sun from within a coffee house in San Jose, the imperfections in the orb's surface evoke fond childhood memories of scrutinizing sunspot activity projected live onto a viewing surface at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Here I've taken rare liberties in dramatically changing elements of the original color scheme: the background has been altered from a uniformly extremely pallid tan, to create a sense of astronomical context and depth.

The second offering is an unaltered juxtaposition of spheric elements rendered abstract by a shallow depth-of-field. This was one the last photographs I took during last weekend's getaway with my wife and parents.

A couple of years ago I discovered an amazing book of photographs by Sam Abell, The Life of a Photograph. In it he presents dramatic and often breathtaking pairings of single subjects taken from varying perspectives -- one shot relatively close, and the other from further away. The resulting inclusion/exclusion of visual elements makes for delightful surprises in the perception and interpretation of each photograph.

While not in exactly the same vein, it is Mr Abell's dualities/symmetries which has inspired both this submission and yesterday's.

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