Sometimes cottonwoods need to be coaxed into Spring.

Still bare after all these months

Spring seems to be a bit slow this year, but the trees are trying hard.

Will be a nice harvest in the Fall

Cold But Rhythmic

I’m not sure this is a cliche

But it ought to be. Bare branches (with or without the snow) against a clear sky are to me some of the most natural sights to be found. Our ancestors grew to humanhood in the forest and the forest remains, in our deepest brain, the arch-type of both the best and the worst of places to be. It’s comforting under an overspread tree, it’s frightening amidst choking dense trunks at twilight.

The tools of conjuration

These are the homely tools

For bringing more than mere sustenance. In truth, we don’t really need to cook our food, for the most part. Okay, dried beans and rice need the touch of boiling water, but we don’t need Chili Verde con Carne y Frijoles, do we? Nor do we need Ginger Fried Rice. We need calories and proteins and certain minerals. Anything we do, beyond filling the need, to dress it up, is mere art, decoration, recreation. There is a school of thought that says the culinary is the original art, the first attempt at rising above the mundane, to achieve a place among the Gods.

I left in all the black and all the white

When is black and white better than color?

A: When the color gets in the way.

This photograph has spectacular color, straight out of the camera with no darkroom magic applied, but the gesture of the sky was obscured, the rush and scurry of the clouds was lost, amidst all the flash and spectacle. With color, this is just another sunset. It’s better this way.

Awaiting the Midnight Hour

The Entry Bowl is very precious

To Blue Bear. When it’s not holding the entries to the Thanksgiving Prize Drawing, it’s his to drink from what and when he will. Meantime, the deadline to enter the drawing is getting ever closer. Midnight, MST, Friday. As they say, if you don’t enter, you can’t win.

A quiet evening by the fire

We hit 10 below last night

Here in Casper. And we’ve spent the day huddled indoors, gathered by the trusty stove.

But Dragons don't twitter

It is a sad thing

When a dragon can’t get it’s way. But it’s a fact they are technologically challenged. Never met a dragon with a PC or smartphone. I think partly because the claws get in the way, and partly because they don’t read very well.

Sorry dragon. Besides, dragon’s breath is very hard on photographs.

An experiment in selective color

I’ve mentioned that these works

Are sketches or studies, and this is certainly the case here. I wanted to find out how emotional responses would change as color is removed from a scene, especially one that had been filled with very wild color to begin with. I took nearly every color away from this sunset. No greens, no yellows, nor browns (which, in fact, are a class of yellows), leaving only a bit of red, a touch of blue and a good deal of what we photographers call ‘tonal values;’ that is to say, blacks and grays. Compare this photograph with this one, which was made in the same place and only a few minutes earlier, but it was developed in a wholly different way.

I think here you can see the importance of the palette of colors used by an artist. Another example to illustrate: Monet’s painting technique is not greatly different from Van Gogh’s, but the emotional impact is much changed by the palette of each painter.

All the entries go in here

These are the first few

And it’s filling rapidly. You may have heard that I’m giving an original fine-art photographic print to some lucky someone the Monday after Thanksgiving. The winner can choose among three works: “Wearing Whites”, “Purple Mountains, Purple Sage”, or “Long Time Livin’”. The complete rules and all can be found on the page, “A Thanksgiving Drawing”. But the short form is that you enter by tweeting (while including my @WalterHawn handle) any page from The Daily Photograph™, by commenting on any page here, or by commenting on any posting on my Facebook profile. You can enter every day, twice a day, until midnight Friday, November 26th. I hope you will!

So, I hope you’ll enter, and I hope you’ll think about ordering a fine-art print for someone you love or for yourself.