Thanks for the link to Dorothy Caldwell. Her last quilt there has a hill that reminds me of the one Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Flurries. I’ve always thought if I could get as much character into a simple hillside I would indeed have accomplished something. I think the idea of tracks is a key one, tracks being the trace of life, whether people, cows, birds, plant growth patterns, etc.

Your (final?) version reminds me a bit of a textile artist — Dorothy Caldwell — who embroiders tracks, sometimes randomly, across the face of her very large pieces.
They tend to be white tracks on dark or black, the reverse of yours. But the leaves, as you have manipulated them, become more and more like mark making (an honorable artistic term) than like foliage.

It seems to me you’ve achieved a cross between representational and abstract that’s more striking even then many of your other photos. It’s quite eerie and wonderful.

I’ll willingly sign on to the notion of heart and camera going together. The brain comes along for the ride, but never leads the way. I don’t think being a physicist makes any difference in my approach, though it helps in problem-solving tasks involving understanding of light, camera settings, etc. As far as maximizing “quality data” or a “clear result” in some documentary sense, I’m actually more often working in the opposite direction.

Thanks for your observations on screens and flatness. I’ll have to think more about that.

When I first started photographing, I did more stuff like throwing the camera in the air, and Leslie and June are right that doing something different can generate new ideas. But even if one of those shots turned out fabulous, I don’t think I would find it satisfying. I wouldn’t have the pleasure of going through the process and really engaging with the scene in the way I normally do. It’s the heart part.

One more comment about the physicist thing: in college I found myself among a lot of Outing Club people. These climbing, caving and canoing daredevils were mostly involved in the hard sciences.

This is getting richer.

It was elevenish when I wrote that and I had a bad case of indigestion from too much calamari and catfish poboys washed down with an Anchor Steam. As such, it is now time to review what had issued from my full but suffering self.

Let me start with “stance as a photographer”. I was going to respond that I mean only where you stand to shoot, but then saw the statement for the complexity that it contains. I tend to use my camera as a recording tool and lose sight of a camera’s identity in others’ hands. For many, cameras are extensions of their very selves and where their hearts go so too their cameras. Boy, am I uncomfortable with that last statement - but it’s true enough often enough. Does it apply here? Please forgive me, but if I were a physicist, I might want to supplement the mathematical and numerical representations that I find in nature with something immediate and that touches more of me. And as a physicist, I would bring a rational approach that would temper and inform my emotional responses. I would, perhaps, be looking for the camera location that provides quality data and that allows me the best shot at a clear result. That might suggest standing back a little. But then I am not that physicist (all caps with an exclamation mark). But, if I were, I might find a headlong dive into the confusing welter all the more exhilarating.

Today’s take on your picture is somewhat Japanese. I can see the foreground as a screen that hides yet reveals the cottonwoods. I’m used to seeing Japanese screens in terms of flat patterns and depictions that establish a resonance with the foregrounds and backgrounds that they modulate. As such, the overhanging foliage at the top adds one term too many to my imagined relationship: I look too much at the screen and not enough through it. But you may reasonably retort that Japanese screens can have all sorts of images from big monkeys to ship-borne Dutchmen, and I will come back by saying that they all live in the thickness of the cloth and for a dialog with what lies beyond them.

Your thoughtful approach is most tempering to a person, such as myself, who would throw the camera in the air and see what came out in the proof sheets.