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.

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.

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.

A meditation on Seed and Sun

You may recall this shock

Of prairie wheat from an earlier post. I liked it so well that I cut it loose from the parent grass clump and found a suitable vase for it.

I’m not sure quite what to do with it now, but I still like it. Perhaps it will become another recurring character in still life photographs, alongside the Bowl of Roses.

Just hangin' out in the sunshine

The sun slanted so well

On this vine that I spent several days exploring and learning about backlighting and how it works with color. Ordinary reflected light looked fine on the vine, but with the sunlight glowing through the leaves, the colors deepened and came alive. I learned that even five minutes could make a huge difference as the sun angle changed.

It hangs there, ready to help

I saw this towel in the bathroom

Patiently waiting. Waiting. And, I thought, that’s a neat fold and drape there. And, that could be a symbol of the human condition, or some part of it. So, I carefully lined up my lens and photographed this towel on the wall, in situ, as I found it, in the light of the setting sun.

We're still more than a month away

The leaves are certainly the right color

And in the right place for Halloween. There are some stands of aspen on the mountain I don’t want to miss, and the breezes are blowing hot, then chill, then hot, again.

I had intended this to be a black-and-white photograph, but the focus point, on the strip of light, put the near leaves out of focus, and that made the BW version not-too-hot. I suppose that’s whence came the rule about never having an out-of-focus foreground. As you can see, in color any problem is much smaller.

And, I discovered that on close work, one must use the spot-meter in nearly the same line as the lens. See that blown-out leaf just to the right of center? I metered that, but from about three feet above the ground. The center of the lens was about eight inches up. Big difference in how the sunlight reflected.