Tag: Black & White

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Usnea Florida

NCWinter2018-95

This patch of Usnea, though very similar to the same type found in Florida (aptly named Usnea Florida), is unique to the Appalachians.  Like it’s Florida relative, this lichen has medicinal properties, is high in Vitamin C, and in a pinch can be used as gauze due to its antiseptic properties.  Although I should not be amazed any longer by things that indigenous people knew about nature, including the Timucuans chewing on willow bark to alleviate headaches, I am no less delighted every time I learn about a new use of a natural phenomena.

The lichen hangs on a black pine branch, and given its size and volume it must’ve been growing there for quite a while.  Lichen is a slow-growing organism, but I must admit that I don’t know enough about it to judge how long this one has been growing.  The light green of the lichen is set off by the dark rhododendrons behind it, and I actually enjoy the composition from a purely artistic, aesthetic standpoint as well as a documentary one.

I grew up around Spanish moss hanging from every limb of our oak trees that grew outside my bedroom window.  The only attention I paid to the moss was the ever-present caution from my mother to avoid the ever-present chiggers whose bite itched worse than a thousand mosquitoes.  I did not appreciate the epiphytes then, and it wasn’t until very recently (during my self-education on lichen) that I discovered that Spanish “moss” is actually a bromeliad, and is more closely related to the pineapple then actual moss.  Most of the epiphytic air plants that grow in Florida (genus Tilandsia) are bromeliads, and the subtropical climate of Florida is perfect for them to flourish.

Perhaps because I grew up around so much moss and lichen, I never truly appreciated them before I began documenting them in photographs.  In the photographs, I was able to more greatly appreciate their simple beauty.  I think my gateway drug was resurrection ferns (Pleopeltis Polypodioides), which fascinated me through their natural (no pun intended) symbolism and their innate ability to come back from the “dead.”  Once I found one epiphyte that captured my attention, it was a short matter of time before the others did so as well.

I love being able to share my renewed, and almost childlike, fascination with nature with Kemper.  Though his attention span is short, I can see the buds of interest taking root.  Perhaps it won’t take him almost thirty years to fully appreciate the natural world around him, but if it does, then he is in for a treat.

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Curiosity

LittleTalbot-11

As evidenced by the sweat on Kemp’s brow, it was a hot day at Big Talbot Island when I took this picture of him in his live oak “fort.”  Although he went through a bit of a rough patch at the beginning of the year, since then he’s been everything we thought he could be in more.  Although we never doubted that he was a great kid, his attitude and outlook on life has changed for the better in ways that we could not even imagine.  He still has his moments, but then he is a six-year-old boy.

I love taking him to Big Talbot Island, selfishly because I can take pictures of him candidly as he plays amongst the live oaks, but I enjoy watching him in the outdoors getting sandy and wet while he chases the sand fleas and the ghost crabs among the huge driftwood trees.  He’s a cautious little guy, but he is become more comfortable climbing the trees which only rise about five feet from the sand at their highest.

I am incredibly proud of the little boy he’s becoming, and I am constantly amazed at the way his brain works in the capacity of his memory and his intelligence.  He has a fascination for music, and I am always blown away when I hear his little fingers on the piano.  His newest number that he practices without prompting is “Ode to Joy.”  Out of the blue, I will hear the opening notes slowly at first and picking up steam as he becomes more comfortable.  They are instantly recognizable, and his natural year for rhythm and tonality fascinates me as much as the music fascinates him.

This photograph shows a little bit his curiosity, but it is impossible to capture the depths thereof.  The questions he asks are genuine and delving beneath the surface.  When he asks “why,” he is genuinely curious of the answer, and the questions usually go to the very mechanics of the universe in his life.  I don’t know what he will become, whether lawyer, or musician, or doctor, or professor – the world lies open before him, and his curiosity will lead him to places that none of us can imagine.

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Falling Behind

NCWinter2018-10

As the lone photographer on nature walks (Kemper stayed behind), my place is in the back of the queue.  I used to feel as if I needed to walk with the pack, and would scurry to keep pace, missing many photographs to do so.  Soon, though, I stopped and thought how rare it was for me to be out in nature in North Carolina, and also how it was my vacation as well.  North Carolina used to mean fly fishing for my dad and me, and we still fish on occasion, but my attention has shifted to photography in the past three years or so.  He relishes the role as my “spotter,” and so we are still engaged together, even without fly rods in our hands.

We both used to loathe walks, but something about the woods of North Carolina evinced a change in us, and we willingly go on hikes through the fallen logs and chaparral of the dense undergrowth.  Anna tagged along on this hike, and she kept pace with me at some points and at others she walked ahead with my dad.  When I stopped to change lenses (from telephoto to macro ), they evidently had lost interest in waiting for me, and I quickly lost sight of them.  I caught up in about fifteen minutes, after finding a bunch of polypore mushrooms and an intriguing shelf mushroom.  They were happy to wait and chat as I ambled up the path back towards the car, and I was happy to watch my footfalls, lest I miss the photographs I once raced past to not be left behind.

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Leaves of the Fall

NCWinter2018-57

Beyond any other pursuits, photography included, I am a writer.

I went to Wake Forest on a creative writing scholarship, and even got a full ride to Dartmouth for the same.  (I chose Wake, because in high school I didn’t drink or ski, two prerequisites to attending Dartmouth, I was informed.  I am forever grateful I made that decision, though I do have flights of fancy every so often as to where I would have ended up had I chosen the Ivy League track…)

The first real writing endeavor I undertook was when I was seven and wrote a short story about a kid surviving in the wilds of North Carolina.  It was wholly implausible, but at 15 typed pages (for a seven year old), it was a veritable novella.  When I was sixteen, I began writing what would turn out to be my first novel.  I completed it at Wake, which is to say, I wrote the words “The End” when it seemed appropriate; however, in my mind it remains unfinished and unpublishable in its current form.  Every so often I get a wild hair and re-write sections of it.  Some day, I will dedicate myself to rewriting it, and perhaps I will even submit it for publication.  It’s working title was “The Last of the Romantics,” though this gave way at some point in college to “The Leaves of the Fall,” which is what it remains to this day.  I love that title, and the symbolism that is packed into those five words.

I have gone through phases of dedicating myself to the craft of poetry, and then to drama, and then back to poetry, and then plays about writing poetry, but I always land back at the novel – that unfinished magnum opus that may never be.  I have written a couple of others in the interim, and a number of short stories – some of which I am more proud of than others – but none that I am so proud of as to submit them for any competition or publication.

In the end, I have always written for myself.  It was a release when I most needed it, and like my earlier post on melancholy, this desperation was a bountiful muse.  Now that I am in a happier, softer place, I do not need writing as I once did.  The craft will always draw me.  We are different poles of the same magnet, pulled together at all times, but somehow never quite managing to forever join together and fulfill our attraction to one another.  In some ways it is like a subtle addiction.  I can kick it from time to time, but when I let myself, I relapse into the world where I am consumed by writing.  These little daily epistles satiate me, for now, but they are like methadone to a heroin addict.  Although they replace the visceral need, they are a poor substitute for the real thing, the thing that I crave even when I am not actively thinking about it.

I generally do not stage my photographs.  I take them as they come, as they are presented to me.  In this way, my photographs are documentaries of how I encountered the world, rather than fictional accounts of how perfect I wanted the world to be.  In this case, I gave into my addiction, in part, and posed this water oak leaf on a stone staircase on the property up in North Carolina.  I wanted a shot that corresponded with the title of the novel.  I wanted cover art for a book that may never be bound.  Perhaps this is wishful thinking, or perhaps it is a subconscious recognition that some things I just cannot escape.

Unlike alcohol or any other addiction, I can be consumed with it without being consumed by it.  I am still whole the end of a poem or a chapter, perhaps even more so, having gained a bit more insight into my psyche.  I can live with that.

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Winter Willows

NCWinter2018-55

I leave today, I’m packing light: a suitcase, some toiletries
The rolling hills and willow trees of Carolina wait for me

-Benjamin Gibbard, Carolina

When I set foot on Wake Forest’s campus, I knew it was home.  It is often difficult for me to recall the details of every important life moment, especially if I didn’t put much stock in the moment at the time.  Yet I remember pulling off of Silas Creek Parkway, and seeing the hedges at the entrance to Wake’s campus like it was yesterday.  It was the Fall, and the leaves had already begun to fall as my dad and I pulled through the gate and onto the main road into the campus.

Carolina is still home in many ways.  It is home insofar as I have deep, sometimes painful nostalgia for it.  Nostalgia comes from the Greek meaning an aching for home.  I ache to be back in the foothills, to be back when the leaves turn and fall.  For a long time, I ached to be back at college, but now that I am in a job I enjoy, in a place I love, I do not covet the thought of being back in the dorms and going to class every morning.  Too much has happened in the interim, and I am not the person I was when I was eighteen and stepped foot onto the campus.

Having said that, in many ways, I am more that eighteen-year-old now at thirty-four than I was at twenty-two when I left, or even thirty, when I hit the reset button and chose to fundamentally change who I had become.  To all who met me, I was a happy, laid-back person, who had the capacity to find the joy in the littlest things in life.  I was more this person than perhaps I gave myself credit for being, though at the time, I considered it quite the facade.  Today, I am returning to (or perhaps becoming for the first time) the person I so desperately wanted to be when I was at Wake.  As they say, selfishness and self-seeking have slipped away; I have a new outlook on life.  I comprehend serenity, and I know peace.  For me, North Carolina embodies these promises, and so, one day I will pack my back, to where the rolling hills and willow trees of Carolina wait for me.

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On Melancholy

LittleTalbot-5

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.
-Baudelaire
I stumbled on an article yesterday, entitled “The Benefits of a Blue Period.”  In short, the article posited that periods of melancholy in our lives allow us to more greatly appreciate periods of happiness.  I read the article with great curiosity and enthusiasm, as I wholeheartedly agreed with the hypothesis.  One of my favorite professors at Wake Forest, Eric Wilson, wrote a book to this end entitled Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.  It is a brilliant little book, and I have read my copy multiple times.
Professor Wilson taught me to love Blake, and Wordsworth, and Shelley, and especially Keats, who wrote a beautiful poem entitled Ode on Melancholy, where he observed that pleasure and melancholy are two sides of the same coin (Keats’ metaphors are, of course, far more elegant); one cannot fully appreciate the prior without having first experienced the latter.  A rose is beautiful because it must die, because it is, at its core, ephemeral, as life itself is.
I took this photograph of my son, Kemper, earlier this year at Big Talbot Island State Park, just north of Jacksonville, Florida.  It is not the most elegant composition, but it evoked the memory of sitting in Professor Wilson’s class, engrossed as he discussed the wild Blake, and the addled Shelley, and the elder statesman, Wordsworth.  In 2007, I visited Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home, and I personally bore witness to the Lake District’s daffodils he was so fond of as I wandered lonely as a cloud.  I would soon thereafter realize, however, that I had not yet experienced true loneliness and solitude.
I have found myself in the depths of melancholy, with a singleness of isolation and anguish.  I was no better (or worse) than Coleridge, whose consumption of laudanum sustained his melancholic madness (that brought us Kubla Khan) until his death at 61.  I often thought I would end up like Coleridge, though with the ignominious distinction of anonymity to all but those who loved me.  Yet I persisted with my own course of self-medication until I was thirty.
I cannot say that I, with a fit of passion and self-realization, quickly emerged from the chasm of melancholy where I had made my home for nearly a decade.  My ascent was gradual, albeit progressive.  At some point along the way, I cannot say when, I gained the perspective of the Romantics – I did not regret the melancholy of my twenties, nor did I wish to shut the door on it.  I had been humanized and humbled by the darkness; because of it, the light shone that much brighter.  I am indebted to Professor Wilson for planting the seed, which, though it lay fallow for years, eventually grew of solid stock.
A rose plucked from a garden is beautiful because it must die, as all beautiful things must, one day, come to an end.  A silk rose in a glass vase is a pale imitation because it possesses no vitality, it is a mere imitation.  I recognize that I am an imitation – not a mimic, but a feigned likeness of a whole human held out to the world – a world, which chooses, most often, to accept me for what I seem rather than peering behind the curtain to who I truly am.
Before I get to afar afield, let me bring us back to melancholy and to a close.  As I am grateful to Professor Wilson, I am grateful for my melancholic past, and, yes, even for the fits of melancholy that I will continue to experience throughout my life.  Emerging from the darkness, the light is all the more vivid.
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Walking On

NCWinter2018-45

I was initially not pleased with how this photograph turned out.  The figures of my mom and Kemper are sharp, but the trees and leaves in the foreground are blurred, as I was fiddling with my settings to take earlier photographs with my wide angle lens and, candidly, I forgot to change them.  When I came back to it after a bit of contemplation, however, it grew on me.  The focus of this photograph is and should be my family, and the other blurred features, which seemed like a distraction at first, repose in a secondary position.

This is, I think, a good lesson learned once again from a photograph that has taken on a life of its own.  Family is, and should be, the focus.

I keep long hours in my job.  When I started, I would get in around 5:30 and leave after 7:00 in the evening.  I saw Nora and Kemper very little during the week, and it took a toll on me.  Nora was young enough that she changed daily, and getting home after she went to sleep meant that she had changed drastically in a week.  Kemper changed, too, but not as quickly.  Still, I missed being able to see them each day.

These days, I get into the office around 4:30 and leave around 5:30 or 6:00, and rarely do I miss either of them before they have to go to bed.  Nora runs to me now (or at least toddles quickly) and throws up her arms when she sees me.  I pick her up and she tells me about her day in her own language that she can only assume I understand.  I hesitate to put her down, even to give Kemp a hug, because this is our time.  When Anna feeds her and puts her to bed, Kemper and I have our time.  We have taken to lying in his bed and talking about both of our days, if for no other reason than to share that my days have their challenges as well.  He cherishes these “long talks.”  I do too.

My days are long, and I am worn out by the end.  I shoulder a lot of responsibilities in the hours that I am in the office, but as this picture attests, family is my focus – even if sometimes I lose sight of this for the blur that is the rest of my life.  Indeed, even when I forget to change the settings, the important things remain tack sharp.

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Turkey Tails

AngelColor-14

This photograph of the “turkey tail” mushroom (Trametes Versicolor) was taken in the Nocatee Preserve on Christmas morning with Kemper as my photographer’s assistant.  I gave him my old Nikon D40, which was the first DSLR that I ever had.  It has seen Alaska and many other beautiful places, and it served me well until I upgraded to my current D7100.  Kemper took to photography like a duckling to water.  As I am drawn to paths and mushrooms and other natural wonders, he is drawn to sticks and mosses and the sky.

A number of his photographs turned out, though we need to work on focusing a bit more.  His hands are a bit small yet for back-button focusing, and so I reset the camera to focus on depressing the shutter button by half.  I think he gets so excited when he is ready to take a shot (as evidenced by The Pose).

I love taking photographs of mushroom, because they have some of the most beautiful variety of any natural phenomenon.  Some are medicinal, while others are deathly poisonous.  Some are edible, while some are deathly poisonous.  Some are beautiful, and some are beautiful and deathly poisonous.  The turkey tail has gorgeous growth rings that show up especially well in black and white.  Like many woodear mushrooms, they are harbingers of doom for the tree that they grow on, but even as such, they are beautiful to look at and to photograph.

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York Minster Windows

SSA Photography (344 of 400)

I am indebted to many of my past teachers and professors, but there are those who leave a more lasting impression than others.  My Latin teacher, for instance, was one of the most influential teachers I had in high school, and she prepared me so well that my Latin major at Wake Forest was all but a foregone conclusion.  We all use Latin daily, whether we are aware of it or not.  Us Latin geeks are more tuned in to the derivatives, and we make conscious decisions to use Latinate words wherever possible (in lieu of that vulgar German stock).

As a lawyer, I am a writer first and foremost.  It is my craft.  As a photographer, too, I view the world differently than most attorneys.  Indeed, I perceive the world aesthetically through an artistic lens, whether or not I am behind my camera.  This appreciation for art is due in large part to my AP Art History teacher.  When I was 20, I saw my first cathedral outside of my art history books.  It was on a trip with my wife and her family to Europe.  We stopped for a day in Mallorca, and I made a pilgrimage to La Seu (Palma Cathedral).

I stood before the great vaulted entrance for a terribly long time, for the first time in my life appreciating the magnitude of what Judy taught me.  I took in the carvings and the arches, and then once inside, I looked with a child-like wonder at the rose window.  I walked down the central aisle in the nave (knowing, of course, what this part of the cathedral was called), and for the first time it struck me that although I had memorized the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I had never known what it felt like to physically stand under Michelangelo’s handiwork.  I couldn’t tell you how the chapel smelled, or what sensation I had when I first walked inside.  But now, standing in the dimly lit chapels of La Seu, I knew what it was to be inside a gothic cathedral.

Last summer, I visited Anna’s family in England.  Her cousin/godmother lives in York, and we went for a short day trip to visit Alice.  Alice had inherited a tortoise from the previous owner of her home, and he was nearly one hundred years old.  Kemper still asks about the tortoise, and this will be his memory of York (for now).  For me, however, I will remember York through the photographs I took of York Minster, the grand cathedral of York.  I will remember it, because I understood it.  I will remember York Minster, not just because of its august presence, but because I was taught to appreciate the buttresses and the vaulted ceilings by an uncommonly wonderful teacher.

In many ways, I think I missed my calling.  I am always mildly jealous of my best friend (Nora’s godfather) who is a professor in North Carolina.  I was helping proof a paper for which he allowed me to contribute some research, and I was overcome with a modest pang of regret (made all the more acute when I had to turn back to the Response to Petitioner’s Motion to Dismiss that I should have been working on instead of immersing myself in the effect of language policy on the colonialization and Americanization of Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th Century).  But I am happy where I am in life.  I have a job I enjoy at a firm I adore, and I will always have my photography and my writing.  I owe all of these things to my teachers and professors, especially those select few whose lessons continue to teach me to this very day.

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Deer Moss

NCWinter2018-40

This lichen (Cladonia Evansii) is a familiar one.  Known mistakenly as “deer moss” this fungus is a lichen, not moss.  As the name suggests, this fruiticose lichen is important forage for whitetail deer in the eastern states.  Though not as plentiful amongst the trees as the usnea lichen that seems to attache to the branches and trunks of even the youngest saplings, among the rocky hills, the light ash-gray clumps of lichen are visible from long distances, interspersed between the darker slate-gray stones.   The lichen grows extremely slowly, only three to ten millimeters per year.

The patch that Kemper and I found on our walk down the driveway was decades old and thick with a radius of lichen stretching out ten feet from the center in all directions.  The thalli (branches) are interwoven, and the result is a springy, spongy mass.   This type of lichen (Cladonia) can be found all over the world, and its name varies as the animals that forage on it change.  In the northernmost reaches, it is known as reindeer moss, and further south it is known as caribou moss.  Kemper and I even found some in a Jacksonville swamp during a hike, and sure enough, cast in the mud was a hoof print of a small whitetail deer.

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