Photography is such a subjective art..

Always looking to see things in a different light… as it were…

The hints and tricks abound…
Leading lines , and placement of the ‘subject’ in certain areas of the frame.
Quadrants, and zone focusing…

Adams, and Cartier-Bresson, and any number of flash (HAH!) in the pan photographers.
Fashion photographers, and street photographers, and landscape photographers…
Papparazzi…

Any style of photographer you can come up with… there’s a practitioner out there who claims it for the one true style…

Don’t get me started on style…

But as long as you take what is good, and can see your way through the pretentious and the merely stylistic nonsense… as long as you can see your way through the fluff of another trying to convince you to join their cult… you’ll be okay…

Don’t let the naysayers and the “anything, as long as it’s new…” campers get to you…
In whatever you do…
Business, or teaching, or the law… politics… you have to decide.

Will you be a sheep, following the loudest, most selfish and obnoxious ram out there?
Or will you decide for you and yours what is to be important, in spite of the opinions of others…?

And for God’s sake, don’t try to foist your personal leanings onto others.
It just pisses them off, and makes you look like everyone else on the planet.

Don’t we have enough cults as it is…?
Practise what you preach, and let the chips fall where they may…

I’m partial to my chips baked these days…

 

So, anyway… the photo above…
Colorful…
Dramatic…
… you know…

Stuff…

And if we look at it as a mapping of light and dark?
What picture emerges if we’re successful at subjugating our imagination?

If I can take the bright areas as a given, and all dark and shadowed regions as a making, if you will, a set of nature-imposed blinders, which only allow us to see so much but no more…
What might I be looking at?

Does anyone else see a incredibly stylized (there’s that word again…) hourglass?
How about an old-time pump handle…?
Maybe the number Nine, seen from behind…?

Anyone…?
Anyone…?
Anyone…?

Bueller…?

 

And what does it say about me… or you, for that matter… that I see the backwards nine plain as day… but only if I consciously ignore parts of the thought experiment I’ve imposed upon myself…?

 

How should I know…?
I’m just as lost as the next guy..

 

But I try to be at least conscious of my personal foibles… my limitations…
If not actively at war with them!