Tree Mirrored in a Window — Photos of the Week

During the week, most days, I felt like I was struggling to find something to shoot.  And if I did have an idea, it didn’t want to work. But the week turned out to be pretty good. My favorite was this image of a tree in a mirror.

I saw this image of the tree in front of the Fine Arts Center at Calvin College while heading for a parking lot and stopped to take pictures from different distances and points of view with my 18.3mm Rioch GR. It wouldn’t be nearly so dramatic in summer when covered in leaves.

This point of view was my favorite of the bunch, and I rendered it in B&W with a sepia tone for drama. The line between inside and outside is hard to tell, and you have to look to find me in the picture.

From a philosophical point of view I like the image because it captures the absence of a clear line between the natural and built environments and the place of people in them. Many twenty-first century people, like modern people for a century or two before them, think of nature as wild and separate from our daily lives.  Most of the time, most of us modern folk, encounter nature most often as a tended landscape.  For that matter, most of the “wild” landscapes we experience, at state and national parks, are more or less managed too.

The other images from this week are a mixed bunch, taken with different cameras. You can see them below in the gallery.  I almost picked any one of them for my favorite of the week.

I liked the image of the sign in Lowell. A family-oriented fraternity? They once were, by definition, a male space. Going family friendly may be the only way to survive in the twenty-first century, when family men don’t have time for things like the Lodge and unattached men have many other options.

The image of the sage is for me one of the first markers of the return of greenery and life after the cold of winter and the decay, rotting, and death revealed by the first stage of spring in the melting ice and snow.

The telephone pole behind the tree struck me as a Lenten image (cross/tree), but my first thought when I imagined the image and took the picture was the work of Lee Friedlander, specifically his images of trees and shrubs, where he looks for abstract patterns in tangles of brush.

Finally, one of the images is another of the Fine Arts Center at Calvin, to give you a more contextual image of the structure and the tree in front of it.