And while we’re at it, an example of a transformative tessellation. There’s a lovely rock at Drift Inn that is half marble and half something else, product of some very long-ago intrusion. All by itself it offers a complex landscape, not easily parsed for creatures unless one is really adept at spotting them:

But a bilateral mirror transformation (and some judicious saturation and contrast tweakage) opens a whole world of possibilities:

I read this one in many ways: there’s a Cheshire cat, a mustachio’d knight, a pair of dragons (or perhaps they’re heraldic tigers), a brace of red squirrels, assorted golden fishes, even a bodhisattva. But you may see other somethings.

About a year ago we were participants in an online workshop with Andy Ilachinski, the upshots of which are still echoing in my photographic life, and the stuff I wrote still rings true when I reread it. One of my own personally-most-important images is at the top of the page of one exercise, and reminds me of an Encounter with Paul Caponigro himself at Home Kitchen Cafe a bit more than a year ago. Overhearing a conversation about photography next to me at the counter, I guessed that it must be Paul Caponigro who was saying that his son (John Paul Caponigro) did that digital stuff, but he himself was still using film. When his interlocutor got up to leave, my golden opportunity arose:

me: You must be Paul.
he: Who wants to know?

… (back and forth introductions)

me: I’ve been a fan for 55 years…

he: You aren’t that old.

me: One of your photographs changed my life

he: Oh yeah? which one?

me: (describes the soaped window, enthuses, fawns…)

he: There’s a horse in that one.

Exactly. And thus, in 1964 or so, I realized that it was OK to see, and to seek out, things that weren’t really there, shapes and forms that bloom from one’s imagination.

Yesterday I stopped at Drift Inn beach (which I’ve visited hundreds of times) on my way home from Marshall Point, and walked around revisiting the familiar array of rocks, and of course found some new ones which I duly photographed. It wasn’t until I began processing this one that I noticed the horse in the upper left quadrant:

I’d been drawn by an abstract pattern of light and dark, but now it’s impossible not to see the horse, and easy to imagine that the wholly imaginary horse called me over with a subliminal whinny.

I spent part of yesterday morning photographing the familiar rocks of Marshall Point, a locale just 3 miles away that I’ve explored many times and basically feel is bottomless (i.e., I can keep going back and not ever feel it’s been exhausted). See the Flickr album for pretty much the whole haul of images. Earlier collections: A Marshall Point afternoon and Marshall Point revisited. Some of the same rocks recur, with subtle variations of mood and mien.

Introspection around what I’m doing and why is pretty much ceaseless, and really something of a pleasure at every stage, from initial capture through processing and on to eventual grouping and layout in the pages of a Blurb book. But what, you may ask, is the point of photographing rocks? Or, for that matter, anything else that one returns to again and again? Initially I’m looking for patterns and designs that fill the frame in an interesting and pleasing manner, and sometimes I see a face or a creature that prompts the click of the shutter, but many times the creatures only resolve themselves during the processing, or even after the processed image has been uploaded to Flickr. And sometimes it’s not until an image has been mirrored (tessellated, as I like to say) that the hidden beings manifest. Minor White wasn’t just blowing smoke with his oft-quoted dictum

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

In a somewhat more Delphic mode, Minor White also said

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees,
identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

…all photographs are self-portraits.

Perhaps I should be choosier about what I photograph and what I commit to the semi-public space of Flickr, and surely many of my images are ultimately forgettable, but many of them have the germs of stories that only emerge after days or months of ripening. This blog space ought to see more of those tales.

this one seems really sublime:

a whisper into a listing ear?