Umbrella cockatoos come in screeching numbers, bright white forms streaking across the sky: angels blasting death metal. Continue reading “Portrait of a Cockatoo”
Portrait of a Cockatoo
Tag: black and white photography
Moss in the Afternoons
Hello Again
Apologies for the very, very long break in blogging: I spent the summer making stories and photographs, a pursuit often located far away from a decent internet connection.
There is so much I saw: a diamond-crusted morning in the mountains, clear and crisp enough to cut. Forest glades hidden among granite, alive with birdsong. The delicate unwinding of ferns into the sunlight. Carvings too intricate to have been made of anything other than human ingeunity. Lakes crystalline in sunset, each bird its own mirror image. Trees aflame with scarlet minivets, orange-and-black flickering blazes.
I can’t wait to share it all. Till then, enjoy this flowerpot abstracted into pure light by darkness.
The Run of the River
Evanescence
Portrait of a Gaur
Indian gaurs are the largest bovine in the world. Listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, they are only surpassed in weight by rhinoceroses, hippopotami, elephants, and giraffes. Overhunting has threatened them through much of their south-east Asian range, however, notably in Vietnam and Cambodia.
In protected areas, they flourish – and can indeed coexist with humans, if not disturbed; this individual regularly fed some fifty meters from tea workers in the Western Ghats. It’s not a consistent trend, however – that same area records a death per year from gaurs not noticed in the dark by people wandering off the roadside.
Being able to observe them in their natural habitat is nevertheless a privilege – they hold a dignified air about them, a firmness in intent, and sometimes an almost-human confidence in their glinting eyes.
Abstractions from the Embers
A fire smoulders on a dark night in Bangalore, India.
we burn with unapologetic fury
against the dark, the dark,
the creeping creeping dark;
sing with unrestrained vigor
into the silence, the silence
the humming humming silence;
live with undimmed spark
for the light, the light
it grows and it grows and
it grows
Monochrome Contemplation
Two students meditate at a kungfu school in Qufu, China.
Waders Dressed in White
Two Little Egrets and a lone Grey Heron stalk the shallow waters of Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, just a few hundred meters from Malaysia.
Coup d’Oeil
Car-window glimpses –
hints at something beyond
the fingerprinted glass
and constant humming
of movement and silence
in their endless dance,
because you love like this –
bittersweet heart-in-mouth.
You cannot do anything else;
no space forms for anything else
in disappearing tarmac behind
and knowledge of the gap between
possibility and reality.
In the Spanish, or possible French Pyrenees, this house up on a hill, the snow-capped mountains behind, presented an unimaginably picturesque site. It looked as if a postcard had been pasted over the car window.
You get the most peculiar sense of deja-vu sometimes when you’re travelling, especially when driving and there isn’t time to examine the feeling further – perhaps it’s a result of our constant exposure to information, so we see much more, but I’d like to think it’s just a connection to a landscape, to a place – like it’s ok to leave your heart there, half-way across the world.
