Photography: Selected Works

Photography can be an excellent form of art, especially when it encompasses elements of construction and vision, rather that rapidly taken shots of people and events which can be stored for future personal recollections of time and space. I have been engaged in this art form for a number of years; some of these photographs have been accompanied by poems directed at the image, as seen in ‘Cats and Clouds and Other Matters‘ in this Poetry and Art section.

I intend placing new or additional photographs here over time. Sometimes themes emerge from such collections, although not always. I tend to focus either on collections of natural objects, or scenes involving water and clouds, or the expressions of individuals. In the former category, there are sea-birds gathering on a small rocky island off Knysna Head on the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa, the masses of blossoms on our neighbor’s tree in North Carolina, and a field of poppies close-by. Water and the sky are represented by the view of The Sentinel peak at Hout Bay near Cape Town, and the coast of The Outer Banks of North Carolina. Interestingly, these are images of contrast; they both show the Atlantic Ocean but at opposite ends, in North America and South Africa (a straight line between the two places would be 12,000 km long without any intervening land mass), while one is early evening and the other is at the break of dawn. Expressions of individuals can be either flowers, with a red and purple hibiscus in our Winston- Salem garden (the former recently being given the photograph of the month award in our local NPR radio station), or animal (our adopted calico cat in Franschhoek) or human (a fellow Welshman ready to watch a game of rugby, also in Franschhoek).