The life of a photograph is pretty chancy: many never get processed from their RAW capture, some of those that do never make it to viewers’ eyes, and some are out there on Flickr but hardly anybody happens upon them. And a few have second and third lives after their original appearance. This one was an offhand grab as we walked along the shore of a pond at Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland:
Surely geography. I liked it for its ambiguity of scale (an aerial view of an island? a closeup of a mossy rock?), but it’s had only 4 views by Flickr users. And then this morning (2 months after it was taken) it occurred to me to mirror it, and lo and behold:
I see an owl with wings spread, perhaps closing in on a mouse. There are other possibilities too, of course, but it seemed to me that it belonged in my Flickr Album called A Catalog of Wings for Celestials.
And then I happened to look at the lower left hand corner and saw this mountaineer coming around a boulder:
So many wonders…
I love your transgressions of the customary reticence of photographers to comment on the presented visual image—a piece of friff takes on the aspect of a rock climber appearing around a crag of a mountain that’s actually a small rock with lichen of uncertain scale…. Or the mirrored image taking on the look of a sweeping stone owl in mid-flight. There’s your humor at play, and it provokes us all to do the same– to
regard the visuals around us with an elfish /impish eye. And that engages us with the incestuous pananimate nature of all that is. Hooray!