Patterns

I guess I’m  easily distracted.  Things catch my  eye, whether I’m looking for photographic possibilities in the yard or just walking from the front yard, after filling the feeder with thistle seed,  to the backyard to spread food on the designated areas in the back.  Since we live between the Hayward and Calaveras faults, taking precautionary inventory pictures of the small things that are around the place  also puts me in the position of having my attention caught by some angle or other, some confluence of lines or texture.   The pattern shots here, with one exception, were taken for a part of one of the LVS classes on how to use a digital camera.  It’s a bit more challenging to find shots that will work with the one medium telephoto prime/macro lens I have for the digital body, but it works well for small to macro size patterns and reasonably well for patterns that are tight enough that a small detail shot of the larger pattern will work.

This red popcorn ear from the garden is fully two and  three-quarters inches in length so it fit the parameters well and I just liked the sort of visual counterpoint going on with the darker kernels; your smileage may vary. *smile*.

I think  of pattern shots as extractions from a larger subject and, as mentioned in my post, “A Change in the Whether,” when I do something right, to me pattern shots and abstractions seem to have a sort of rhythm and tempo to them.

These flower pots caught my eye as I walked the area around the house looking for shots for class.  This shot could have benefitted from some of that lovely late afternoon light, but it was not “kicking up” that day. Alas for light.

Pattern shots are a lot of fun to put up, large, as wallpaper on a computer display, if it’s not too hard to read any shortcut icons you may have on the surface.  The pots work okay but the following photograph of a rock from the Stewart Lithia mine in Pala, San Diego is a tad busy. Colloquially called, “graphic granite,”  it has a peculiar growth habit that gives it a pattern all its own, something like  cuneiform, if written by a third-level apprentice  scribe who was  clearly  unable to color within the lines.

The mineral macro shots here were taken with the tripod head removed from the tripod and mounted on the post of a copy stand by means of a Bogen superclamp. Another superclamp holds an extra wide Lepp macrobracket to support two flashes that can be positioned to cover most styles of lighting-very handy to give full form to crystals (or whatever other macro subject is being recorded).  For purposes of passing some light through things from below there’s a plexiglas box in which can be set a flash below the subject, sitting on the copy stand base. This set-up allows things like this macro shot of patterns of magnetite crystals included in the hexagonal growth of this muscovite (mica) “book”.  I may be biased because it’s a mineral, *grin* but I enjoy this monochromatic abstract when the shot rolls around on my screensaver.

A pattern you want to explore and capture can catch you up unexpectedly anytime you are functioning with your photographer’s eyes alert.  This basket handle and weave caught my attention on a shelf above and behind the lighting  stand with a model skull on it that was wearing my coat to be a model in an assigned shot using bounce flash for a class. After seeing it up there I had to bring it down and explore the surface from all around to see what distillation of elements of it’s appearance was drawing my attention.  Once I found that, it was added to the patterns/abstract collection.

I’ve collected patterns from lava flows, machine parts, oil sheens on water,  the rolling swells of a nearly exhausted boat wake, detail extracted from tufa towers, flattened tin cans affixed to the side of a building for protection, geyser muds, cooled cracked obsidian, dried cracked mud…all manner of subjects…I’ve had a ball stumbling across elements of a greater scene that can stand on their own. Take your camera out for a walk, you may too!

Happy Pixel Wrangling!

cheers,

pete