If you remember the 60’s you weren’t there, so it is with a degree of caution, that I volunteer a fog like memory from 1967 of reading The Illiad and the Odyssey, having a fascination with the seductive powers of the singing ‘Sirens’, and Odyyseus’s purported solution of instructing his crew to fill their ears with beeswax so they would not be lured by the seductive singing, thus experiencing the same fate as others before them, crashing their ships, upon the rocky coastline, and sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Photographically speaking, we’re all guilty of succumbing to the ‘Singing Sirens’, but unlike the ‘sounds’ of the ‘Sirens’ it is our eyes that are seduced by their natural beauty, i.e. the Slot Canyons in Paige Arizona, Half-Dome in Yosemite, Haystack Rock at Oregon’s Cannon Beach or the Dolomites of Italy to name just a few, but often times, ten feet to the left, thirty yards to the right, or just underfoot if not overhead, an as yet discovered and compelling composition of beauty awaits.
Unlike beeswax to avoid the lure of the Sirens, you must make the difficult choice of walking past the ‘obvious’, in effect, covering your eyes to the obvious, and scanning with a greater intensity the abundant and often ‘hidden’ beauty that is to be found all around you.
Yesterday, I shared the image of the Sitting Buddha in Bhutan, and afterwards we headed back towards the waiting bus when I spotted several large bronze molds, stacked atop each other, a ‘junk pile’ of sorts and it was on the insides of these bronze pieces, that my eyes caught site of the seductive Siren you see here, a Siren of colorful welds and textures, which at first glance suggests a NASA photo from space or is it a far away galaxy? Beauty IS all around us, but it is hard to see all that beauty when our vision has been seduced by the ‘obvious’.
Nikon D500, Nikkor 18-300mm, focusing as close as possible, F/14@1/200 sec, 400 ISO Sunny/Daylight WB.
Wow and amazing. I would love to have your eye.