Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Morphology



You ever notice when you start a new project, it goes in a different direction than the one you intended when you started it?  I started this blog in April, and it's fast-tracked itself into an entirely new being in 4 short months.


They grow up so fast...

My initial idea for this blog was rather simple.  Take teapot for walks.  Put teapot in interesting locations, photograph same.  I had intended this to grow into having strangers hold teapot with interesting backgrounds and/or odd positions for visual impact, distributing cards for the blog as an invitation to see what I've been up to... Kind of a "Come to the blog to check out your own picture, come back to see others" concept that would drive internet traffic to my project. 

Eventually, this was to morph into Hands Across Wisconsin, aNOTHER blog, where I would focus strictly on hands. 

Hands are the way we explore our world.  We touch.  We feel.  When we shop, we want to stroke a potential purchase, to experience the tactile reality of the object in concert with the visual, aural, and/or aromatic sensory inputs.  We further reach out with our hands to manipulate the objects around us to better input visual stimuli or create new stimuli to the persons around us. 

We use our hands every day in more ways than we can count...from the moment we wake in the morning to composing ourselves to sleep at night...our hands are in constant use.  They are THE primary way we interact with the world.  And these interactions are so commonplace, we don't even realize we're using them half the time.


                    "I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty..."
                                "This is a hands-on project..."
                                         "Hand me that cup, would ya?..."
                                                 "He's a very handy person..."
                                                          "I know this place like the back of my hand..."
                                                                      "She's all thumbs..."


These, and more, are phrases I want to explore with my camera.  There's a whole other world of interpretation out there just by cataloging what we do with our hands, and I want to capture it.  This little blog is the prelude to that study.


And then the reality sinks in..........


My brilliant "life-of-a-blog" plan got shelved rather quickly.  I took the teapot out for a walk once. 
>>>ONCE<<<
We had a good day on my Riverwalk, and it posed in its perky way in the foreground of the waterfall.  It was a wonderful spring day, others were out for a breath of (finally!) warm air, and I got some glances, but no approaches.  Everyone was content to let me do my thing.

I could feel the attention, though.  And that attention was WAY outside my comfort zone.

I like to go in what I call chameleon mode when I'm out and about - nobody notices me until I WANT to be noticed.  And it's easy enough to do - nobody really watches the short, round, self-contained woman in rather plain clothing out on the fringes when there are so many other, far more interesting things to focus on.  There are days when it's a reach outside my comfort zone to pull out the camera and start capturing images - that, in itself, draws attention.

I'm a ninja-wallflower - an observer, a spectator, a watcher, a recorder.  And that guise is a very comfortable aspect to wear.  I should know - I rarely take it off.

So - approaching random strangers with a teapot and a camera - it just screams "Look at ME!!!!!"

Not my cuppa.  So much for the grand concept.


To find interesting situations to put the teapot in that didn't involve jumping head-first into the aforementioned attention pit - I went immediately to plan B: researching disaster stuff.  Fires, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes and weird weather were duly researched online, and 'shop utilized to settle the teapot within the frame.  (I will NEVER forget Perch-nado!)  Found a couple of interesting things to do with that - the stories of Pele, the Waterspout, the Beethoven post to name a couple...



 

I also crafted this shot (featuring just the teacup on the seat cushion) which was originally intended for the Pele post, but because there's snow on the mountain and I was featuring Hawaiian myths, I went a different direction. 






 
Plan B rolled smoothly into Emergency Concept Plan A once I realized it is far too depressing to see what we humans are doing to this planet, and what this planet is doing to us humans in retaliation (unless you see it the other way around).  I'm not here to point fingers at who fired the first shot or drew first blood (such as it is when trying to anthropomorphize the ball of rock we live on) - I'm just observing that we humans are awfully short-sighted in how we're ruining the only thing in the known universe that can support the whole of our race.


                        Only after the last tree has been cut down...
                      Only after the last river has been poisoned...
                      Only after the last fish has been caught...
                      Only then will you find that money can not be eaten.
                                                                              ~ Cree Indian Prophecy

This has to be one of my favorite quotes because it's dead on.  We forget about those things that allow us to maintain our carbon-based meat containers, and instead, focus on acquiring as many little green squares of paper as we can.  Which is unusual, because the little green squares of paper are happy just the way they are.

Christianity looks for a person to herald in the end of days - their representative of pure evil in human form (which is a bit arrogant of humanity, if you ask me...) but I figure they're way off.  We're not looking for a human to usher in the end of our existence...we should be looking for something that influences us in destructive ways.


Money is the Anti-Christ - our new God.

Whoa...where did that come from?  Morphology demonstrated in a single blog post.


This blog keeps evolving to suit the mood of its author.  I really never know what I'm going to write next, or what I'm going to capture in my lens.  Sometimes, the story lends itself in the photo I work, sometimes, its the other way around.  It's kind of exciting, waiting for the inspiration to strike, and an almost physical need to put it together once it does.
 

I can't wait to see what pops up next.

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