Guess Who's Back

Right. So it's been about a year since the last post, and before that another year, and before that about four years. I've decided to cave in to the overwhelming popular demand and resurrect this little corner of Cyberia. I'm going to shift focus in A Little Light Writing away from exclusively language and photography, and make it more of a place I provide updates to the one or two people I know want them.

Why?

I quit Facebook over a year ago, for a number of reasons -- not least of which was the sour feeling FaceBookLife had begun generating.

I'm also currently on an Instagram cleanse. I had started an account to showcase my photography (go see it! @yash.holbrook). Which was fine, but two things happened: 1) I began taking more photos with my phone than with my real camera, and 2) I wasted a lot of time scrolling through my feed and those of others. I'll eventually go back once I've broken the habit, but for now I'm just trying to be bored -- i.e., not tickle my eyes with little squares, and not thinking of things I see in terms of whether it would look good as a little square.

But I'm still taking pictures I would ordinarily share on FB or IG, outlets I've now cut off. So I will start using this blog as that outlet. So let's start with my morning's ride to work through my Stuttgart forests. In particular, a misty sunny October morning at Bärensee.

(A favorite picture spot)

I'll take this opportunity to highlight these are not iPhone pictures.

Portraits of an Intimate Nature

Time for a post on photography...

I've got a few running themes that go through much of my photography. Some time ago, I decided I wasn't a landscape photographer, though I take plenty of pictures of nature. My nature shots tend to be more about details, close-ups — and yet it's not macro photography.

It occurred to me to begin thinking of my nature photography as portraits, intimate portraits in a way. Some quiet natural detail or moment -- often out of context.* I came up with this blog entry's title, meant as a play on words and also as a characterization of many of my nature images.

Rather than spend more words to try to describe what I mean, here is a selection of fifteen images to show you.

Portraits of an Intimate Nature

All of these pictures share a quiet, contemplative feeling that I can only describe as "intimate".

o - o - o

* "Out of context" is itself a running theme I apply to more than my nature photography.