Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Soft Focus


The ball cactus clusters in my yard are just now coming to bloom.   Today, I am posting two photographs I captured of the same cactus.  This particular cactus is growing very close to my bay windows.  I captured the first image three days ago in gentle light diffused by rainclouds.  I softened the focus to allow a certain blending of lines and colors.  I took the second photograph in full light yesterday afternoon.  The second photograph employs a much sharper focus and fills the screen with more distinct detail.
Interestingly enough, I prefer the inexact qualities of the softly focused photograph.   In some ways that is a reflection of my personal life.  I tend to enjoy organization and neatness only to a certain point—what you might call a point of practicality.  Beyond that is what I consider obsession.  In construction, as example, I have seen a few new subcontractor foremen who expended so much labor trying to keep materials super-organized and work areas ever clean they fell behind the rest of the naturally chaos-generating crews and actually lost money for their employer.  They became so busy with organizing stuff they forgot that they had a structure to build. 
I also like the inaccurate and ghostly views provided by morning fog.   In sound, I prefer the muted rolling of creek water as heard through a veil of trees—a place where the sound of the creek does not drown-out the call of nearby birds or the sound of wind shuffling aspen leaves.
I like a place where lines and colors merge together.

 
 
--Mitchell Hegman

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