Fresh salt tang scents the delicious white noise of surf on rock - irregular boom and thump unexpected quiet - pauses Never turn your back on the Sea She is inexorable and quick faster than you think Slams, knocks and pulls Cold! A short bubbled tumble before you're pressed into the polished rocks then fade into icy blackness I wake from this, standing - face tinted orange with the day's new light Dawn feels like days ago and I'm wearing potential's golden glow The world looks different from here huge and at once tiny My effect on it? The same. (Written at Ness, May 2012)
I carry a beautiful thing around in my camera bag. An oculus. It’s a clear glass sphere and it changes the way I look at the world. It doesn’t look amazing on it’s own … in fact it can appear quite dull but sometimes I hold it up in front my face and it takes my breath away. Through the properties of refraction, it renders any scene into a tiny world … a tiny, totally in-focus world. An upside-down, totally in focus world. In the image above taken just after dawn on the far south coast of New South Wales, I rested the sphere atop a rock looking out toward the waves. The fine bedding of the Ordovician mudstones of this part of the coast have been buckled and twisted and rent vertically in places. I brought the sphere (and it’s refractive contents) into focus and rendered the background blurred. It looks great right way up but I like to rotate my oculus images through 180 degrees to aid the viewer’s appreciation of the scene. The little sun flare off the edge of the sphere is one of my favourite parts of the image.
In the image below, I’m holding the sphere with my left hand and shooting with my right. It was taken in coastal forest. This image reminds me that the world is a fragile place and one that we literally hold in our hands as a place to nourish and feed ourselves.
I’m fascinated with different ways of looking at ordinary things. Refraction and refraction images are just two.
What about you? Do you carry anything special in your bag? Something that turns your world upside-down or causes you to look at the world in a different way?
OMG, Geoff. That is unbelievable…and the first time I have seen it in an image. I’m surprised I don’t see more of this. It’s fabulous! An oculus. WOW!
An ‘OMG’ from Ginnie! Wow … I have made the big time! 🙂
You’ll likely ‘see’ these type of image everywhere from now on 🙂
Love these images. My kids used to be entranced by a cool little devise marketed as a
“dragon fly eye”. When they weren’t using it, I was. Anytime visual perception is changed up, I’m fascinated. Enjoying the words AND the pictures.
Dragonfly eye … sounds a cool thing. Refractive glass spheres are cool huh? I love mine 🙂
I love it when reality is shifted somehow. What an amazing way to see things.
Thank you Kathryn. In a strange allegorical way, the light striking our own retinas is upside-down and our brains do all the computation for us 🙂
What beautiful pictures and what a beautiful art technique – a great combination of two great things 🙂
Thanks Thomas 🙂
Your blog contains some beautiful work too!
Thank you, Geoffrey, I try 🙂
After what I have seen on this blog you can be sure I’ll visit you again 😉
You’re welcome to visit anytime Thomas 🙂
wow, your pictures rock … a lot 🙂
such a cool thing that oculus!
Hello! Thanks … a lot 🙂
I love my oculus … it lives in a special little satchel in my camera bag…
omg such clarity…I need to check into this, right now I travel with pen and paper and small camera, but what you see with this lens is magnificant! a whole new world, brilliance beyond measure! no wonder your poetry is so ‘lush’
enjoying your work 🙂
namaste
Thanks Roxie … it’s like a world both within and without simultaneously … it does something for me … something deep.
I started with the volcano and was diverted here before I could comment. Such interesting ways of looking at the world indeed. You are right as you view the world through this sphere you see the fragility before you but at the same time a power so beyond our own. Not even in our wildest imagination could we create anything so beautiful, fragile and powerful at the same time. Great work!!!
Your poem is very thought provoking and I like how you use it to express your inner thoughts, then write something more and finally ask for some participation from those who have viewed your images, read your words and come to visit you in your place of expression. It reminds me of a method they use in the international version of the Bible – which I like very much because through this method one innately stops for a moment to reflect and this reflection like a stone thrown into a pond ripples back to the fore of ones thoughts changing ever so slightly the pond and one’s thoughts (maybe even, life). Thank you very much.
It seems to me that you are a natural teacher, indeed!!!
Thanks Marialla, you’re being very kind. I never thought my writings would be compared to those of a modern biblical scholar … I really didn’t though I know you meant well 🙂
Writing for me is a form of catharsis … it gets things out of my head and into a tangible form … that someone else gets something out of it or thinks about things differently for a bit … that’s very cool too. Thanks for following and reading and commenting and your own writing too. Thanks 🙂