BROTHER SUN

This morning as I was getting ready to photograph a flower, I accidentally pressed the shutter release while the camera lens was facing up into the sun. When I downloaded the day’s photos, I was surprised to find the image of the white sun surrounded by undulations of green/blue sky. Using the tools in Photoshop Elements, I fooled around with the image and got a variety of effects. The first “fooling around” image is a simple solarization. “Solarize” as a verb in photography has come to mean “to change the relative darkness of a part of an image by overexposure to light.” The other images are the result of adjusting hue and saturation.

Music has its accidentals, signs indicating momentary departure from the key signature by raising or lowering a note, and a piece is often better for them. The accidental clicking of the shutter release gave me my most interesting image for today. It’s an abstract impressionist accident.



Remembering WALLACE STEVENS

In a poem he calls "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1947). It Must Be Abstract"

The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.



...And WALT WHITMAN, from "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun"

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams
full-dazzling.



...and among my first introductions to English poetry...WILLIAM LANGLAND'S "The Vision of Piers Plowman"

In a summer season when soft was the sun
...........
A fair field full of folk found I there