Thursday, November 06, 2008

Hawthorn trees Updated

This is the view with a 100mm lens from my childhood home, taken in my teens.
I grew up with these trees as a fixture. They were not for climbing. As you can see they are very dense, but more importantly, they were hawthorn, so absolutely filled with thorns! If a ball ended up in them, you just had to make your peace with it being gone forever.

On the other side of the trees were a cherry plantation. We ate ourselves silly on those as a kid, even though it technically was "stealing". I really miss those cherries; they were sour cherries for wine and cooking, so they didn't taste like the cherries you buy, they had a sharper but to me much better taste. Gawd I miss them. 


Below is a photo from the same years. It's typical of what I tried to do back then, and maybe still: make photos which were about lines, tones, and textures, and not about the subject. It's a tricky thing to do, you have to disconnect the part of your mind which all the time is evaluating what things around you are for, and what they do and what they mean.
Of course once you've changed your own mind, you still have the audience left. It's frustrating to present a picture which you consider very artistic, and the audience says "yeah, it's a picture of _____, so what?" Very few people have the ability or even the desire or concept of looking at things disconnected from their significance.

6 comments:

Hannah said...

Huh. I think you just answered a question of mine. I haven't been able to figure out what I like about a lot of your pictues - but you're right... it's the colors, the lines and the textures. It's the way it all fits together to make an image - not necessarily of something but just how it all fits.

Thanks!

P.S. I do read pretty much everything, I just don't always have something to say.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thanks, darling.

Anonymous said...

Wow. I so hate that hawthorn picture. hate hate hate. I keep trying to enter it and see it to its misty furthest end..and I'm left, stuck in this world, dissapointed.

One of the best pics posted. I love images that leave the viewer with that otherworldly magical sense.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Um, thank you? :-)

I've just updated the post twice.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Wine cherries? I never knew such things existed. Are they a regional thing or do they grow other places? Coincidentally, the last batch of non-kit wine I made was chokecherry. Oh so very good.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I wish I knew where to find such cherries now. They were smaller than "regular" ones. I'd give my left nut to have a supply.

Sadly, the plantation was sold for housing in my early teens, and even though there were many lots for many years with the trees still on them, without care they did not give any fruit. Maybe the birds got them, I know the owners had used lots of effort (noise) to keep the birds away. When I was small, the old owner was still around, he walked around firing a hand pistol and yelling "Heyda-heyda-heyda-heyda!!"