Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
In the preceding post (Dog and fish) I described an encounter with two fisherman; two dogs and a fish while walking along the Hudson near Scarborough Station. One of the dogs (and the fish) appeared in that post. This is the other dog with his owner taking a break from the fishing. He (the fisherman – not the dog) was gracious enough to allow me to take a few pictures of them.
This picture and the one in the preceding post taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-3.
Taken at the park next to Scarborough Station in March, 2011. I remember that I’d taken the train home (getting off at Scarborough) and decided to take a short walk by the Hudson river to unwind and to see if there was anything worth a photograph. Two men were fishing. They each had a dog. As I walked by one of the fishermen pulled out this fish (I think it’s a striped bass). The dog (I don’t know if it was his, or his friend’s) was really excited. It’s not the best photo I’ve ever taken. I’m not good when things are moving quickly and a lot was happening at that moment: the dog was jumping up and down; the fish was flapping around on the line a lot. But I guess I like the incongruity of it. After all you don’t often see a dog mesmerized by a fish the way this one was – or at least I don’t.
I was walking towards Stillwater Pond in Fahnestock State Park when I spotted this spider web. It seemed to just float in the air with no apparent means of support, backlit by the sun. I liked the original color version, but the brights yellows and greens and greens in the background seemed to distract from the web itself so I decided to convert it to black and white. Unfortunately in the conversion I pretty much lost the spider itself, which was large and a bright red color. You can see it as a dark blob at the center of the web.
I’m not referring to Usain Bolt here (although I do have a picture of him on the blog: see What an amazing photograph of an incredible athlete). Rather I’m referring to the rabbit that has recently started to appear in our garden (see A new visitor) and which one of our granddaughters has named “Bolt” after the famous Usain – I suspect because the rabbit ran so quickly.
I was walking the dog around the lake when I started to think about why I take photographs. In my reading I’ve been advised that it’s not enough to take a picture just because I liked the way something looks. I need to know why I liked it. To know what I was feeling when I took the picture.
For some reason I started to think about why I’d taken the picture of the rabbit. One reason was I thought that it was really cute. A second was that our six year old granddaughter was really excited to see it. A third was that it’s not every day that we see a rabbit in our garden and I wanted to document the occasion.
Then my thoughts wandered to rabbits in general and all kinds of thoughts came flooding back:
I have a clear memory from when I was young of seeing a rabbit with milky-white eyes. It was quite traumatic and I later learned that it was a victim of a horrible disease called Myxomatosis that appeared in the UK in the 1950s and decimated the rabbit population (fortunately rabbits breed – well like rabbits – and they the rabbit population in the UK has since recovered and also developed immunity to the disease).
I also remembered my grandfather, who was a bit of a poacher who would from time to time bring home rabbits for dinner (or tea as we used to call it). I hadn’t realized that rabbits were for eating so this was quite a shock. I was very close to my grandfather and it was nice to have this memory of him return.
Watership Down – a book about rabbits. I started to read it our kids at bedtime when they were quite young. We never did finish it!
Could it be that, unknown to me, these thoughts were hovering around just below the surface and influencing my decision to take the picture?
I had also read that a photograph should be able to stand by itself and should not need words to explain it. All well and good, but I doubt that I could come up with a picture of a rabbit that by itself could conjure up all of these feelings – unique to me – in another person.
Or maybe I just liked seeing a cute furry animal in a place where I didn’t expect to see it?
I was wandering around at a nearby working farm when this cow (I think it’s a cow) ambled over. I waited for a while in the hope that it would look up, which it eventually did. It’s a fairly rare picture for me in that 1) I don’t often take pictures of animals and, more significantly, I almost never take pictures looking down. I’m not sure why that is. I usually take pictures at eye level and sometimes get down low to take pictures looking up, but I rarely take pictures looking down.
I imagine I was thinking that it looked rather “cute” and I’m sure I had a smile on face because of the way it looked up at me.