Attention to Detail

I share coffee once a week with a friend of mine, a kindred soul who once confessed to me that he, too, had been a photographer of some success in his younger days.  What stopped him was the realization that almost everything he shot was echoed in someone else's work; that it was a very hard field in which to set yourself apart as an original.

... which troubles me, as well, from time to time, and certainly drives me to expand my photographic horizons -- and often to refrain from shooting the familiar and the obvious, however much it draws me.

So, though I love them, and wish my salt and sand-encrusted yard could grow them, I don't tend to shoot flowers, though as you can see here I occasionally make exceptions to that rule.  This one was taken in our island's beautiful Bloedel Reserve, found in a patch of blue hiding on an out-of-the way path that was shared with me by a fellow artist.

And every time I look at this image I marvel at the delicacy of it -- the fine hairs on the stems, the ruffled edges of the petals, the shyness of the flower as it faces down, the hope of the pod that, having dropped its heavy petals, angles up toward the sun... I love the attention to detail we find in nature.

And this morning it reminds me of another poem introduced to us by David Whyte in the workshop I attended last weekend:

A Modest Love
by Sir Edward Dyer

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,

   The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;

The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,

   And bees have stings, although they be not great;

Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;

And love is love, in beggars as in kings. 

 

Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords;

   The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move;

The firmest faith is in the fewest words;

   The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love:

True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak;

They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.