Photo Venture Camera Club went to Garfield Park in Indianapolis to photograph flowers and foliage in the conservatory yesterday.  This is always a good trip.

A friend and I were talking as we were shooting and he said that his wife asked why he photographed leaves.  He responded that he was attracted by the textures, colors, shapes, etc.; in other words, aspects we see but which do not translate easily into words.  The leaves were more a platform for exhibiting these features than they were objects in and of themselves, at least for my friend.  I suspect that is a problem for some photographers – they go out to photograph, say, leaves, and don’t get much because they are not attending to the light, the shapes, colors, textures etc., aside from the label ‘leaves’.  I bring this up because it can be hard to avoid getting trapped by the words.

Words are important as ingredients of communication but unless one is doing documentary photography where it is extremely important to show exactly what is there – the aftermath of a storm, the condition of a house that is for sale, an accident scene – the features of the scene – the light, textures, shapes, colors – are often more important than the fact that we are photographing leaves, trees, reflections in water.

As you can see from the examples I have shown so far, I don’t think it too important to represent what I saw as objects so much as platforms for the features.

On the way home it struck me that maybe this is at least part of the answer why photographers are so often attracted to crumbling buildings.  These buildings can’t really be adequately described by words; pictures, images are needed and what is interesting about them is not so much the crumbling structures themselves but the textures, colors and shapes.

Well.  Having solved that problem we can move on to solving the problem of bringing peace to the world.

On second thought, let’s save that problem for another day.