Kobe turtle mirrored

Mirrored turtle in a Kobe inner city park

A calming, but not quite tranquil picture. A single turtle, on a stone out in the water, enjoying the heat of the beaming sunlight. A pool of water surrounding the stone that is calm enough to offer mirror images, but wavy enough to jar the mirror image. As so many other images I end up liking, it has an inherent contradiction: an iconically slow animal in a calm scene, but not quite calm enough. Stretching out, aiming its head up, out, and away.

Even in color symbolism, this image stays mostly coherent — the turtle is enveloped in a rippled pond of green reflections from the foliage surrounding it, giving associations of calmness and of fecundity.

At the groundhogs' at SF Zoo

In media res

This pictures speaks mostly in what it doesn't show you. It is a mound of dirt, a crater, with a fountain of sand and dirt cascading out of the crater. It is a picture that, at the face of it, solicits questions. What spews out the dirt? Where is this? Even — what scale is the picture on? There are few hints, but a staging that leads the thought towards a number of different, but homogenous, possible stories for the picture.

Not happy about all this attention

[Lazy Week] Goofy Giraffe

Captured this young giraffe at the San Francisco zoo at JUST the right moment for the facial expression he was wearing.