Saturday morning, Ari and I decided to get far away from the asphalt. We made a trip upstream to Fletcher's Boathouse on the Potomac and glided around the river for a while. We enjoyed the sensation of coasting along the surface and the syncopated rhythms of alternating paddle strokes...the calm and the quiet.
We saw a few ducks. They ignored us.
We saw a snake. It hid from us.
We marveled at this huge tree trunk in the river.
I don't know why the experience is so soothing, but gliding over the river and brushing up against nature restored a much needed sense of tranquility. Having spent much of my childhood near the water, I find it a comforting refuge. (I even prefer real snakes to human ones. I smile when I see ducks preening, but frown at human variations of such displays.) In the end, I do realize that I'm intruding for a moment, creating ripples along the river. The irony that I was driven here by other intrusions such as asphalt, traffic congestions, crowded subway stations, and over-scheduled weekdays escapes me. Or so I pretend. I wonder where the snakes and the ducks go when they've had enough of the kayakers?
2 comments:
I don't know how it is that the items, people and structures you photograph always seem prehistoric in size. The ducks, the cigarette, the tree trunk. V cool.
I'm glad that the emphasis on perspective and scale comes through that way...at the time I took the cig pic, I wanted to magnify the act of littering. At the time I took the tree trunk picture (which by the way was very huge) I wanted the viewer to get a sense of how imposing it was as I kayaked next to it. I'm really glad that you had this reaction to the photographs :) It's all just technique...the angle, camera position and depth of field. Lot's of fun, and it can be done with almost any camera, point and shoot or fancy DSLR.
Post a Comment