nature and nurture

several things contributed to my selecting  this image today:

• my husband and son have been following tennis player carlos alcaraz for a couple years now. so today’s men’s final of the us open is a must-watch big deal in our household
• we have not had a t.v. in our house for 18 years
• in order to watch ‘big screen’ events, the family uses my imac computer
• so, i was without a computer to edit and post a photo for most of the day
• this photos was on my iphone, shot against a white sky, which makes if nearly STILL worthy

but there is also this,

• this photo does a good job of showing the pattern of the seeds in the center of the flower
• the mathematics of sunflowers are truly astounding
• the spirals you see in the center are generated from a fibonacci  sequence –1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…
• in order to optimize seed filling, there are two series of curves winding in opposite directions, starting at the center and stretching out to the petals,
• each seed sitting at a certain angle from the neighboring seeds to create the spiral
• when the angle is exactly the golden mean, and only this one, two families of spirals (one in each direction) are then visible

how fantastic is that? fibonacci, golden ratio, double spirals, optimized seed filling–all visible in one iphone photo.

nature blows my mind!

sunflower in september

perspective matters

i had fun lining up these stripes today. but once i stood up and got a little distance from them, all i could see was a colon. tell me honestly, did you see a chain striped rocks with their stripes lined up?  or a snake? or a colon? i hope you saw what i intended, a whimsical chain of striped rocks meandering like a slow stream.

striped beach rocks from the mediterranean

make a quilt

i had a the dining room table covered with these dried gladioli flowers for a week. i pulled them from their spent stems, sorted them into color piles, and then let then sit for…a week. i mentioned to my husband, steve, that i wasn’t sure what to do with them. i was stuck, because they seemed precious, worthy of extra-special attention. it’s never good when i start treating my subjects as precious. i freeze up. no matter what i make it won’t match my expectations, so why even try. ugh!  after a week, steve casually suggested “why don’t you make a quilt?”  i immediately shot back with “i can’t possibly, the shapes are way too irregular”. even after ten years…i still get in my own way.

dried gladioli flowers

building block

this is the single crane feather i used to make yesterday’s composition. i felt some context was needed–because while i knew what the original feather looked like in that composition, it occurred to me when i looked at the pattern again today, that it wasn’t obvious.  i love the elegant sweeping curve of this feather. i have not seen that in any other feathers i have found, so i am guessing it might be somewhat unique to cranes. any knowledgeable birders out there who can confirm this for us??

sandhill crane feather

copy and repeat

i took some liberties with this crane feather–it’s a single feather that i repeated to create this composition. i think it works.  do you?

sandhill crane feather