IT'S MAYBE EVEN MORE IMPRESSIVE IN MY HUMBLE OPINION (#LOTUS B&W 61) #FINEARTPHOTOGRAPHY,#MINDSEYEPHOTOGRAPHY,#BNW,#BLACKANDWHITEPHOTOGRAPHY,#DSOWENS, #LOTUSFLOWER,#INDIANLOTUS,#SACREDLOTUS,#NELUMBONUCIFERA,#FINEEYEPHOTOGRAPHY, #BNWFLOWERS
0 Comments
Well, the truck is no longer for sale, something about it wouldn't start I think, but, you're still in luck though, the print of the truck is for sale! Sorry, shameless promotion, maybe even bait & switch, guilty... but, man, wouldn't this look good hanging on the wall in a man cave, or even my son's bonus room ! (#RA-2261)
This is titled "PEPPER No.30" By Edward Weston, in 1930's, it's just an unusual shaped bell pepper, but he turned it into Modern Abstract Art, he worked for a week just shooting peppers. To quote Weston, he said , "It is classic, completely satisfying,-----a pepper-----but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter. It has no psychological attributes , no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind, this one take one into an inner reality----the absolute-----with clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the "significant presentation" that I mean, the presentation through one's intuitive self, SEEING "through one's eye, not with them"; the visionary.
In my opinion this is what I feel is lacking in today's teaching of photography, it seems to be about teaching about the gear and the software, but not about the ability to see the images before you take it in one's mind, most of the great photographers understood this, Ansel Adams, would wait for hours for the shot that he had in his mind, before taking it. IT'S JUST A PEPPER ?? This use to be a school in Saluda county, try to imagine !
I hear about this school from several people and many directions as to where it was at, and it took me quite a few trips to find it. Quite often it is necessary to remove the clutter from your overworked mind, according to the Dalai Lama, one should seek at least an half hour each day to be alone, in order to refresh the mind. But, I find it necessary to get out in nature , hopefully at least once a week to free my mind. It works best for me to take the camera along, as this makes me look at things differently, and inversely causes my mind to concentrate on anything other than the reoccurring information that caused me to seek the solitude of nature in the first place. This event is best preformed by being alone, with no expectation of what to expect ! Just wander the local park or sit at your local coffee shop, or in bad weather, retreat to your local library, find a seat with a view of the outside, and just wait...... soon you will be drifting away in a barrage of new thoughts and you will feel the weight of the issues you had earlier diminishing, and in some cases you’ll see some solutions that you didn’t see before.. Bonus points!
I even have had success by just escaping to the front porch late in the day, and plugging in some ambient music and watch the clouds flow by. Give it a try, all you have to lose is a half hour if it doesn’t work, but , I feel it will be time well spent! Cheers ! Awe inspiring I received an email from an artist friend that received it from one of her artist friends, about bringing more AWE into your life. It is a very moving piece of work. I somewhat addressed this in my own words in a previous blog post sometime ago, titled “Natural High”. But this article does a much better job of explaining it, and I felt it was worthy of sharing it to Y’all. Enjoy, and leave your feelings about this if you are so moved! Keep shooting! How to Bring Awe Into Your Daily Life
We have all experienced it, even if we didn’t know what to call it. Whether we’re overlooking a beautiful view after a challenging hike or watching a new leaf grow on the plant we’ve been nurturing in lockdown, the feeling we get in that moment—amazed, inspired, transported—is what researchers call awe. In his new book, “Awestruck,” psychologist Jonah Paquette explains the process underlying the experience of awe and uncovers both its complexity and its value to our well-being. Walking readers through various scientific findings, he shows that awe helps improve our relationships, decrease our stress, and make us happier. By illustrating awe’s many benefits, Paquette gives us a reason to seek more awe experiences in our lives—and then shows us how to do it. How We Experience Awe An awe experience, as Paquette defines it, involves two primary components: encountering “vastness” and experiencing transcendence. Vastness happens when we come across a view (like a spectacular sunset) or concept (such as the existence of black holes) that is too incredible to fit into our current worldview, forcing us to expand our understanding of what is possible. Transcendence happens when we take in this new, awe-striking idea or image in front of us and try to make sense of it. Not only is awe a pleasant feeling akin to wonder, it also helps us to experience a different relationship with the world around us, says Paquette. When we are overcome with awe, he explains, we often experience a “small self”—the sense of our ego becoming smaller, and our needs, hopes, and purpose more integrated with the people and environment surrounding us. “Awe blurs the line between the self and the world around us, diminishes the ego, and links us to the greater forces that surround us in the world and the larger universe,” he writes. In that way, awe can serve a dual purpose, improving our well-being while bringing us together. The Benefits of Awe Like many positive emotions, awe can make us feel good. But awe goes beyond that, helping us to connect with others. Here are some of the main benefits of awe, as recounted by Paquette. Awe decreases stress levels. Awe has been shown to reduce stress levels in both the short term and the long term. In one study described in the book, researchers examined the impact of an awe experience on stress levels among both urban high school students and war veterans. Participants taken on a one-day river rafting trip had reduced levels of stress and symptoms of PTSD that were maintained weeks later. Critically, it wasn’t just spending time outdoors that seemed to lead to reduced symptoms, but nature’s specific ability to induce a sense of awe. The evidence supporting the link between spending time outdoors, experiencing awe, and lower stress levels “has become so persuasive that many physicians have begun to ‘prescribe’ time spent in nature or in green spaces, the way one might typically prescribe a new medication,” says Paquette. Awe increases generosity and kindness. In a study conducted at the University of California–Berkeley, researchers had students spend a minute either gazing up in the middle of the campus’s eucalyptus grove or staring at a drab science building. When a “stranger” (actually, someone working for the researchers) walked by and “accidentally” dropped a box of pens, participants who experienced awe by gazing up at the trees were more likely to help the stranger collect the pens. Later, the same participants also scored lower on entitlement and demonstrated a higher degree of ethical decision-making. Other studies have also found a link between awe and generosity and kindness. Feeling awe makes us more willing to help those in need, and in turn increases our sense of connection to others. “By enabling us to feel connected to each other, form alliances, act generously, and explore new possibilities, it stands to reason that the story of humans would not be possible without awe,” he writes. Awe makes us happier and more satisfied with life. Paquette points readers toward numerous studies that demonstrate how awe can impact our mood. In one study conducted a few years ago, participants were shown a slideshow of either commonplace nature scenes (like an oak tree) or awe-inspiring nature scenes (like the Grand Canyon) and were asked questions regarding their mood both before and after the slideshow. Both groups showed improvements in mood, but those who watched the awe-inspiring slideshow reported a far greater improvement. While awe can make us happy in the short term, research has shown that this benefit lasts, too. In a study from UC Berkeley, researchers had participants track their mood and awe experiences over several weeks. They found that people experienced awe two times per week, on average, and that having awe experiences led them to have greater well-being and life satisfaction even weeks later. These are only a few among multiple studies that, according to Paquette, confirm our intuition: Awe makes us feel good. By reducing stress, increasing generosity, and improving our life satisfaction, awe really is good for us. How to Experience Awe in Everyday life Given that awe has these benefits, says Paquette, we should try to experience it more in our everyday lives. Though many of us may only associate awe with special vacations or occasions—like graduation ceremonies or visits to the Grand Canyon—he describes numerous ways we can incorporate awe into daily routines (and help intensify the experience, too). CHAPMANS POND
Took a ride yesterday morning in the fog looking for shots, well not much fog here, but I still liked it. This was my uncles pond a long time ago, and they even baptize people from Talatha Baptish Church here. Took this images donkey years ago while on leave in Japan from Vietnam, took it with my Nikon film camera (a Nikkormat FTN - which I still have) and a 205mm lens, while riding on a bus, part of the reason it's not very sharp at all, but I still liked it.
Was blessed again with winning the peoples choice award in photography, with my image from the "Ace Basin", titled "Show Me The Way", and also my images was graced on the exhibit rack card, and the exhibitions poster. Thank you NAAG and the Arts & Heritage Center, and all the many fine people that voted for my image !
A old mill in McCormick SC, built in 1898, shot several years ago in color, but decided to convert to my new BNW obsession. Hope you like it !
One of the Lighthouses on OBX, and my little different take on shooting it ! My agent said he really likes it, Oh, that's right, my agent is ME !, Well, so much for what he thinks!
Was recently honored by the North Augusta Artist Guild with "Artist Of The Month" write up in the North Augusta Star Newspaper, attached the article.
AIKEN CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Stop in this Thursday evening for the opening receptions at the ACA for local artists celebrate Hopelands & Rye Patch 50th Anniversary, I will have 3 pieces of work in the show. Redeption is from 6-8pm, show runs from Mar. 25-Apr.30. Take a minute and relax and be enlightened ! Video by Will Senior WHAT IS A NATURAL HIGH ?A natural high comes from any activity that makes you feel good—but doesn't involve drugs. Doing things you enjoy, like riding your skateboard or dabbling in photography, releases natural feel-good chemicals in your brain like dopamine, which regulates movement, emotion, motivation, and pleasure
Nature Most of us are so divorced from our ancestral home -- the natural outdoor environment -- that leaving the city and going where the cell towers don't reach feels like entering an altered state of consciousness. Probably because our consciousness has changed. I know when I'm out there, whether it's at a secluded beach, deep in the redwoods, or alone on a snowy mountaintop, I feel different. I notice new things. My brain works better. I'm high by virtue of eliminating the extraneous sensory clutter of the city. Music We've all heard -- or performed -- music that has left us with goose bumps and chills. We're utterly struck by it, held by it, entranced and touched in such a deep way that we feel moved physically and spiritually. I always think of a concert my wife and I took in some years ago -- a choral performance that ended with a piece so piercing and transcendent that it took my breath away. The hairs on my neck and arms stood up and I was swept up in some collective out of body experience. To this day, listening to the piece catapults me back in time and I feel it in my gut. Science has confirmed the existence of the euphoric music-induced "chills." Researchers asked participants to choose music that gave them the "chills" each time they heard or played it. Then they allowed subjects to listen to the music while they monitored their brain activity with PET imaging. (In other parts of the experiment, they listened to other peoples' musical selections or general noise.) Each participant's chosen music, the researchers found, exclusively produced activity in brain areas associated with "euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse." The researchers suggest that as humans evolved they developed the ability to experience euphoria from more abstract activities like music. Although unnecessary for hard scrabble survival, music likely contributed to social bonding and the cohesion of human communities, which in turn aided survival. Music is also a way to tap into the rhythm underlying life itself. You won't find any clinical trials, but there's real music happening right under our noses every single day. Musicians just reveal it. Dream Remember how you'd hang out at night with your friends, looking up at the stars, just thinking and talking about how immense and crazy and impossible and possible everything is? Remember when you were filled with wonder? Dreaming is one thing that still gets to me and makes me feel like a kid again. Best of all, we have direct access to it. It's the great mystery that we get to explore every single night of our lives. Every night, we enter a fantastical world of our own creation. In this world, time is relative; we can live out entire lifetimes in the span of a single sleep cycle. We become artists, novelists, world-builders and storytellers that put Tolkien, Spielberg, George RR Martin, and Salvador Dali to shame. And we get to live and breathe and act in those worlds as if they were real. It's amazing. What's going on here, chemically? Some researchers think that our brains release very small amounts of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound, during sleep. That certainly seems plausible. Okay, they are more, but you get the point! I was totally surprised the first time it happen to me while doing a walk in Nature with the camera, I just couldn't believe how good I was feeling, later while rethinking this, I realize that it was because I thoroughly enjoy my photography, and this is my reward. I'M NOT ALONEI found out much later that other photographers have this same feeling as well, but most don't talk about it much, I guess for the same reason I didn't at first, because it sounds to strange, but now I'm looking forward to getting HIGH!
Peace Out ! One of the hardest things about entering art competition is deciding what to entry, just because you like it doesn't mean that the judges will, or that the public will want to buy it, so I've decided it's an educated guess based on what has won in all kinds of contest and what people tell you that they really like, and then you pick from the one's you like. This photo was one that I couldn't decide where or not to enter in the SC State Fair, but after looking at it for 3 or 4 days I decided not to, but use another one instead.
|
Author
I only shoot what my Mind's Eye sees Categories
All
|