AR 6 - New Crop of Flowers

It seems I encounter new and different flowers during each walk. This time the honeysuckle and buttercups were gone, but these white flowers were abundant.

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My thoughts were mostly not into photography during this walk. So much has been happening at work that it was difficult to pull my head away and focus on something else. This would prove very dangerous, but I'll get to that later.

Continuing from the last post:

I had a difficult time tuning into the things that were attracting my attention. The white flowers were quite obvious, and that was about the extent of my attraction.

What I'd like to point out about the process of attraction is how dependent it is upon our mood and "frame of mind". What I observed during this walk is that I hardly thought about photography and found it difficult to keep my mind off other thoughts.

When I finally forced myself to respond to my attraction to the new crop of white flowers (and this was towards the end of my 4-mile walk), I broke through the inability to focus on my goals for this photo project and engage in a photo process that was meaningful. It was a short 5-minute walk to the finish after that, but those few minutes were with my head "back in the game".

The lesson to remember is that if we set off to photograph something but cannot engage the process in a meaningful way, a simple forced shot to photograph even a somewhat boring and obvious subject can get the creative thoughts moving.

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I had two too-close encounters today with water moccasins. Both involved me walking up within about two or three feet of the snake before noticing it. This guy opened its mouth in defense, showing me the white insides (thus the nickname "cotton mouth"). It didn't strike at me, but definitely warned me to come no closer. My head was elsewhere during this walk, but the snakes reminded me to be more observant.

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