Thursday Challenge: Green -

"Green, Green Grass of Home"
manipulated digital photograph by Mick Mather
- click image to view full size -

"... but I was thinking of a plan
to dye one's whiskers green ..."
- Lewis Carroll

Carbon credits? Are you serious?

"She, So Green"
digital collage by Mick Mather
- click image to view full size -

"... for in the true nature of things,
if we rightly consider,
every green tree is far more glorious
than if it were made of gold and silver ..."
- Martin Luther

Thursday Challenge: Green -

"Tall Grass"
photograph by Mick Mather

"... sitting quietly,
doing nothing,
spring comes,
and the grass grows by itself ..."
- Zen Proverb

Reality meets virtuality -

"Green Curtain"
manipulated digital photograph & digital drawing by Mick Mather

I have a wonderful digital drawing software program that I don't spend half as much time with as I'd like. In today's post, for example, I've taken a drawing and layered it into something else ... that something else might have been another digital drawing, a fractal flame or, as in this case, a photograph. The curtain always reminded me of that plastic, mesh material that has, indeed, been hung up and used as a shade or curtain. The photograph itself just happened to show a row of buds that appeared to me as hangers when the drawing was layered in. Now that I've completed this piece I seem inspired to do some more drawing today.

(listening to: "G-Day" by The Tapegerm Collective)

Going Green -

"Green Girl"
digital collage by Mick Mather

I really liked what the manipulating software was doing to this piece, except for the hand. It seems to have turned into some sort of leafy appendage that I find rather unsettling, but I've grown used to it. In the arena of green this and green that, I'm beginning to see the whole idea of labeling all things under the sun, including initiatives of sustainability and sustainable living, with that very term, "Green", as a disservice and more than little misleading. Be that as it may, and just because the word itself is so much fun to say, here's something else that's a little bit - wait for it - green!

Thursday Challenge: Green -

"Long Thin Green"
photograph by Mick Mather

I offer another straight photograph for this week's theme, green, at Thursday Challenge. That's right, untouched by filters or editors aside from a gentle cropping. I should say that one of the things about early spring that I love the most is the riotous, to say the least, variety of green that can be found almost everywhere. The other thing I've always enjoyed about the last gasp of winter just preceding that time is the amount of red, orange and purple that begins to reassert itself over the gray and flat brown of the slumbering season. If you look closely, you'll see a little of each in this vignette of green.

Thursday Challenge: Colorful -

"Colorful"
digitally manipulated photograph by Mick Mather

This title of this evenings post is the theme at Thursday Challenge this week. I knew that I had a handful of photographs that would quite likely be usable, and yet, I began messing about with a failed photo that was almost totally black save for the red spot. Primary red at that - so, I went about tweaking and lightening and brightening and layering and filtering and...phew! This is what happened by the end of the process. As the piece developed, a number of other versions, equally satisfying but less colorful, were created. One of these alternate images can be seen at my newest blog, a collaborative, sci-fi creation of an imaginary world known as the Outer Dust Rings.

Thursday Challenge: Green -

"Split Rock Green"

digitally manipulated photograph by Mick Mather

First, this image fit perfectly, in my own mind, for the week's theme, green, at Thursday Challenge. It happens to be one of a number of photographs that I have in the files for a new series that I'd like to finish through the spring and summer. This body of work, called Henderson Skyline, consists of photographs of the tallest structures in the Town of Henderson in Jefferson County, New York. From this silo near Flat Rock to the Lighthouse at Tibbett's Point, I've photographed a number of other structures, including some bird houses, atop poles, some fifteen or twenty feet off the ground. The concept is a bit tongue-in-cheek since this area is mostly low, rolling farm country with a scattering of bedrock sticking up through the topsoil in a number of places, but, I digress. So, what am I waiting for? Truthfully, a collaboration with another photographer is exactly what's kept this project on the back burner. Any takers?