Cellar door

Cellar door

Out in Roslagen, we spotted this entry door to a subterranean food cellar. I liked the worn structures, the decayed but not dilapidated look. To emphasize the textures I saw, in post-processing, I made it black and white, I boosted the greens, and I added some sharpening.

The two slopes lead the eye to the door at the center of the piece, as do the brick wall veining framing the horizontal streaks of the white wall, and the vertical lines in the top wood lining. The underlying message of «look at this pretty door» is underlined by there being interesting — different, but not unbalanced — textures on all sides of the door itself, complementing its own highly textured appearance with more variation in the picture.

A Swedish summer offering

Swedish summer offering

An outstretched hand, offering wild strawberries. A gesture of warmth, invitation, generosity. Warm sunlight, perfectly ripe strawberries — it is a perfect summer scene.

Were I to do anything different with this shot, I'd frame it slightly more carefully. Avoid the close crop of the finger tips. The crop of the wrist, though, stays. It brings a closeness to the picture, an intimacy with the giver that boosts the underlying mood.

Thistle

Thistle

The thistle is a weed, and a thorny one at that. Annoying when it grows where you are trying to grow other things, and even more so when you, or a child, goes at it inadvertently.

It is also, once in bloom, a gorgeous splash of color. A flower with personality well up there with roses and tulips, though quite a bit more punk rock than these more established flowers.

This closeup puts the splash of color, the punk rock chic of the thistle up front and center. And in the background, gorgeous forest-y lush bokeh, and another thistle-bud, the potential of more color, lined up. The composition unbalanced, but harmoniously so. The vacuum on the right balances the potential on the left rather than unbalancing the picture, and a composition that could have been lopsided in fact is, well, punk rock.