I love this image of the submerged leaf with the fairy dust specular highlights, and the water softly flowing past. It’s very peaceful and calming. It’s almost as if the leaf is being caressed by the water. I love to hike up the mountains here. Rivers bathed in sunlight look like melted gold. (Yes, …there is gold up in them mountains.) And you return home so much richer.
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Landscape images are not really my thing to take. It annoys me tremendously that I can’t capture the grandness of nature. They always look flat. I usually work right at the other end of the scale in space by exploring the minute, the intimate, what’s right at your feet. Here I am often after a simplicity and a sort of flatness (for a lack of a better word). But unlike portraits of people (which I don’t ever attempt to take, except of people I know extremely well) I do sometimes try landscapes.
This morning I couldn’t decide which of the two images I should use today. They couldn’t be more different, so they have both ended up on the blog in one post. One is the weather as it is outside, the other represents more of my inner landscape at the moment. Which is which I won’t say!
This is a bit of false advertising! I am currently trying to tie up so many loose ends. For the first time I sat down this morning and didn’t know what to write about. I have to meet somebody relatively early this morning and am therefore under some time constraint. I looked through the images I have taken recently and found this lost looking oyster catcher. The only thing to pick on this bare ramp is a plastic bottle cap.
I’ve just finished this little book called “Modern Puppetry” by a guy called A.R. Philpott. He was obviously a very famous puppeteer in his time, known as Pantopuk the Puppet Man. The book is mainly on puppet making, but touches on performing and the current state of puppetry in general. Current in this case means 1966, as this was when the book was written. I am surprised how much puppetry still seemed to have been part of society then. But I suspect in the meantime I am just living at the wrong end of the world for puppetry.
One sentence in the book really touched me. He talks about finding material for your puppet show, he says: “Once you need them – that is as soon as you start being a puppeteer – ideas will come, a part of your mind being always alert for new possibilities – and not only for puppet characters but also for situations in which these can find themselves on stage. Plots and plays are inseparable from characters.” [p40].
Phew, so I am normal!
Yesterday I told someone a very personal story: it is one of my favorite ones, a brief summary on how I came to form my perspective. I thought I would share the story with everybody:
The pride of my hometown is a huge palace with beautifully maintained gardens. When I was a child, one of the main attractions in these gardens was a couple of swans. It was a big deal when the swans laid their eggs in spring and I wouldn’t be surprised if even the newspaper reported when the young ones hatched. Exciting stuff! However, what totally eluded me was that these swans were black-neck swans, a species native to South-America and very rare in Germany. For me they were simply the only swans I knew, so I just assumed every swan has a black neck.
When I got my first job, I moved away from my hometown. One day I went to the shores of a lake with a friend. And there they were, the beautiful white swans. White from beak to tail feather. I exclaimed: “They don’t have black necks.” My friend laughed at me and said: “Don’t be silly, swans are always white. They don’t have black necks!”
Then I moved to New Zealand and… the first swan I saw was black, entirely black. I can’t remember when I last saw a white one. I wish I still had my friend’s phone number :)
When I was rummaging through my old photographs yesterday on the hunt for my Tui image, I found this one as well. This was one of my first images I took with my Macro lens and I always loved it. It reminds me so much of an old weather-beaten umbrella, in fact it is a parachute perfectly designed by nature.
This is a much better image of a Tui bird, than the one I took last weekend. I have taken this one seven years ago. I remember clearly, there were no cats on the premisses… It makes a huge difference.
Yesterday I finished the Fairy Godmother. While I was watching TV, I played with her for a while, to figure out her traits. No matter how I turn her, she looks very benevolent. A good thing for a Fairy Godmother, right? However, I wanted my one to be a retired Fairy Godmother by the name of Mrs Esta Blished, but this just didn’t work out. I can’t see Esta in the finished work at all. So Mrs Blished will have to be another puppet. I definitely want her too.
This morning, when I opened the curtains in the living room, the Fairy Godmother was still lying there and she looked as if she has just awoken from sleep herself. I couldn’t resist taking her photo as she was.
I wanted to start this day by taking a photograph of a Tui. These native birds love to congregate in one of our trees in the front garden. Their beautiful song is just such an invitation to get up and get going.
Unfortunately Tuis never sit still and it wasn’t an easy task to catch one. The sun just touched the crown of the reasonably high tree. Only one of them popped up long enough for me to get a couple of mediocre shots. It’s good that I don’t need high res images, so I could crop it drastically. It’s not an artwork, it’s just to show what the birds look like with their shiny black plumage and the two curly white feathers on their throat.
I walked around the tree to get a better angle, and there I found this mean looking little cat sitting under the same tree also waiting for the Tuis. I guess he thought the song was an invitation for breakfast.
I thought I would finish this week with a generic feel good photograph I took this morning in the garden. It is a glorious day out there. Monday is a public holiday, courtesy of the Queen. It’s her birthday (as an aside for all those people who are not living in the Commonwealth – or is it Common Wealth? Ah no, impossible!).
I have a lot of stuff lined up I want to continue on. The dede puppets had some news this week, but they are still pondering whether it is a blessing or a curse, so they are not making a statement just yet…
I am pretty sure I saw Chance zipping past me when I left the shops yesterday. I only got a brief glimpse of her. Oh, I so wished I hadn’t fluffed around with Minor and Detail for that long… Chance is a difficult one to get hold of. Her father was a gipsy and she has no fixed abode (and would you believe it? She doesn’t even own a mobile).
I consider her one of my best friends, even though we hardly see each other at times. When we meet again, we just continue where we left off last time as if we had only seen each other the other day. I would have loved to have talked to her yesterday. She is such a positive little thing!
dedepuppets 