outdoorswithcamera

Scroll down now if you want to skip the musings of this former academic and just see the photos!

Most of my professional life was spent in linguistic anthropology— that subfield of anthropology dealing with the role of language in culture and society. Many of us linguistic anthropologists study poetics. Russian emigré and Harvard professor Roman Jakobson considered “parallelism”—rhyme, alliteration, and more complex forms—the defining feature of poetry. Poetics, or the poetic organization of speech (especially ritual speech), is broader than poetry per se, and the crucial role of poetics in ritual discourse around the world reminds us in white middle-class U.S. communities that our narrow view of poetry as marginal to life, politics, religion, etc. is itself a marginal idea in the world.

For years now, I have found parallelism, or patterns/ pattern repetition, in nature, and have tried to capture it photographically. The photos below are examples. Some of them represent a differene nt sort of nature intruding on my hands in camera jiggle or some such “error” or “accident” on my part. Oh well— I like the outcome and hope you might too!

All of the photos below are available for purchase as rights to the digital photo as download.

The first in this series portrays geese flying “in formation”— or in a pattern. It is also an example of motion blur, covered in one of my earlier posts here.

Shot with Olympus EM-1 MarkII mirrorless digital camera

When grasses bend to the forces of wind and gravity, each stalk bends in a nearly identical way, creating another example of parallelism in nature.

Parallel star trails

The phrase “star trails” refers to “a type of photograph that uses long exposure times to capture the apparent motion of stars in the night sky due to Earth’s rotation“ (from the Wikipedia article by the same name).

The apparent parallelism between the individual star trails reflects the single factor determining this appearance— the rotation of our little planet. So, is this parallelism in nature or in the camera? You decide!

The photo below was taken just before sunrise. The subject is the San Francisco Peaks. The parallelism or near perfect vertical repetition of the profile of the Peaks represents a happy accident in the moment of taking the shot— most likely, touching the tripod during a long exposure of the sort Olympus calls a “high res shot.”

Thanks in advance, and please come back soon— photos make great gifts! For giving (or keeping) various tangible products made from my photos, go to wilcephotos.com