It’s Sunday night, in the meantime I’ve boarded the train to Vienna, and off we just went. Here’s the second part of my New Year’s Walk on Saturday afternoon.
These images were taken on the southern shore of river Gail, only a short walk away from where I live, although this actual walk took me full three hours round-trip, but that’s due to the fact that I continuously took pictures, 200 all in all.
In the morning I had tried to catch up with The Twig Photographer’s blog. It’s one of the blogs where I’m constantly behind. Well, in fact I am constantly behind with most blogs that I regularly read. Some I visit mostly for the images, and then catching up is easier, but there’s no way I would want to skip Mark’s writing. He is not only one of the most entertaining bloggers, always controversial, never afraid of being rude, but there’s also always something to be learned.
At the moment Mark has a new series about “Seeing”. I think it began with “civilized ku # 725 ~ Autumn color # 46”, a post where he quoted Stephen Shore:
"I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it’s that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I’m interested in."
Much of what Mark has written since, circles around this "state of heightened awareness", and inspired by that, I decided to just take a walk in the neighborhood, letting go of all preconception, going with the flow. I did not even pack my camera bag as usual. Normally in Carinthia I carry at least the Sigma 8-16 (which is tremendously useful at a river shore), the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, and the Nikon 70-300 VR, in case I need a long lens. The Nikon 50/1.8 has a permanent home in this bag as well, but this feather-weight does not really count.
In this case I just used the Tamron. I hardly change lenses anyway, and originally I didn’t expect to go down to the river at all.
My first stop was at an empty car park, where there are still big mounds of dirty snow. On top of these mounds, people have put trees. At first I had thought they were disposed-of Christmas trees, but instead they are some kind of Thuja. I have no idea why they were put on top of the mounds, but my first project was to picture them.
In the end, all interesting images were from the other side of the river. There is a sandy shore and due to constantly changing water levels, it is frequently flooded. As a result, there are beautiful patterns of sand, along with the ice. I spent about 40 minutes there, staying until the sun was gone.
The Song of the Day is “Every Grain Of Sand” from the 1981 Bob Dylan album “Shot Of Love”.
It’s almost impossible to find any original Dylan song on YouTube these days, but fortunately I found it on an Italian site and under a completely unrelated video title.
Flo (2011-01-03)
I agree with you about you choice of the photo you featured this time. I love its bands of information and I might even call them the image's story line. In this image, more so than in the others, the story is of the now-frozen water which had carried with it, like baggage, those rounded river stones. And like other travelers, the water dropped the baggage stones that became too heavy to carry. I also love the ice flowers that look like daisies in some of the other images. I might call them "winter daisies" or something similar.
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