I've been scanning some images from last year, trying to understand what I was doing at that time, and why. This was shot with my Mamiya 645, probably handheld, using my 80mm f 1.9 lens and some Ilford Delta. It is the same patriarchal maple tree on Broadway that I blogged about back in February of this year. The silhouetted branch is at the tenuous edge of sharpness....beyond that everything else is out of focus. I find something very poetic and haiku-ish about this image...even more so than the last image I posted. The lack of perfect sharpness, the curved, gnarled shape of the branch, the black sky full of flying snow. It was a poetic scene...but I am uncertain if the sense of mystery and the ephemeral nature of the moment are adequately conveyed by the image. I think I am searching for an understanding of the inverse relationship between technical mastery and poetic attainment. In other words, it seems that a soft, gesture of an image can sometimes speak volumes, while a tack sharp paradigm of technical skill will generally have little of importance to say.
