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

In a somewhat more Delphic mode, Minor White also said

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.