Tag Archives: Santa Fe

Nature’s Graffiti

Posted on by

2016-02-16NaturesGraffiti3291

Once upon a wall in a city far, far away, Mother Nature let her hair down and went crazy with her spray cans. You don’t often think of her as a tagger but in this case she saw an empty wall and went for it. Usually she works with earth tones or pastels and sometimes a simple black and white, but every once in a while, maybe after a long weekend in Key West or after watching the Hindu festival of colors, she really hangs one on.

This image is a collection of colors you don’t often see together. They’re not wrong, although they may be a little jarring to someone with a more sensitive palette, they just give you pause to look more closely at them and wonder. What was on her mind when she layered that bright vivid lime green against that orange-ish red. Then to add that tracery of greys and off white to soften all that open space to the left plus add the deep intense scarlet of the berries as a counterpoint, it just shows that she has the chops to pull off anything she wants to do and make you like it. Or at least make me like it, your mileage may vary.

Lots of us are still seeing the white on dirty white of old snow and the dull grey of two month old ice on the sidewalks, so this is a breath of fresh air, color-wise. The city is Santa Fe which can almost pull this look off all by itself but in any event it’s an invigorating view on a cold winter’s day. Got to remember that it is only 31 shopping days to the Spring equinox and then some of us are going to start seeing sights like this for real. Think Spring.

Deep Winter Color

Posted on by

2015-12-19DeepWinterColors1883

The deeper into winter we get the more the colors go away. The vibrant palette of summer has been replaced with the drab, dead looking shades of winter. The colors are not really gone, they’ve just become dormant. Walk around your neighborhood and look closely at the various bushes and shrubbery and notice how the stalks of the plants still have much of their color left. Check out the guys house just down the block who has just painted it in the neon colors of his favorite football team and pray that his team loses so he’ll change it back. Watch for the winter birds, maybe you’ll see the bright red of a cardinal or the colors of a Cedar Waxwing eating berries that are still bright and shiny. Color is still here, you just have to seek it out.

If you’re down in here in Santa Fe the colors are a different collection. This part of the Southwest has decided on a pastel range of earth tones that don’t seem all that colorful at first glance, but wait a little while. The light will begin to change and suddenly these shades take on a hue that is a perfect choice for this time of year with a uniqueness that you can only find here. Muted colors that blend together in a perfect harmony of shades and intensities. And they do it in a very pleasing way. The great bold shapes of the buildings create wonderful palettes of color that are even more distinctive by their size. You are surrounded by amazing shapes, planes and shadows that each have their own colors and it is a mix and match of wonderful shades that make Santa Fe such a wonderful place.

Even the freezing cold of a high desert winter can’t subdue these shades of Deep Winter Color.

Out of The Darkness Softly

Posted on by

2015-11-03OutofDarkness3584

As a cold totally dark night in Santa Fe fell there was no moon and no stars. The temperature was below freezing and there wasn’t the slightest hint of wind. The cold entered deeply though your face, your hands, your very body as you breathed the freezing air. Your bones became the repository of the cold and promised to release it only slowly. No matter if you stood in front of the fire, or poured fire down your throat, you were going to be cold for a long time.

As you hurried to your restaurant with its promise of roaring fires and delicious smells the lights began to come on. Slowly at first then gaining in brightness as the darkness softly provided the contrast. What an amazing contradiction. The promise of warmth that you see and feeling the exact opposite with every breath you take. The beauty of the bold shapes, the look of the intense colors as they shaded from light to dark. It was a pointillist painters dream come true. If Georges Seurat were here you know he would brave paint freezing in the tube and hands paralyzed with cold to paint this scene.

The colors were mesmerizing as the muted yellow of sun gave way to orange, then amber, and finally melded into the deep sharp reds of luminous coals buried deep in the bottom of a perfect fire. All presented against a background of inky black that was the night. But then that’s the magic of Santa Fe, and the magic of a perfect night, the cold not withstanding.

Moorish Window

Posted on by

MoorishWindow3367

One of the best things to do when you are a photographer is to simply wander around looking for the unexpected and in Santa Fe you find the unexpected almost everywhere you look. While walking down a back street I came up to a wall that stretched for the better part of a block that enclosed someone’s property. It was constructed of the typical adobe that is Santa Fe’s soul and other than being beautiful on it’s own there wasn’t much to distinguish it from any other adobe wall you see. But as I walked along, there it was, the unexpected, an incredible fantasy in cast iron set into the wall where hardly anyone but a wanderer would see it. Why would anyone put a fantastic window like this here, where as beautiful as it was it seemed out of place when viewed from this side. As I stood there looking at it a shadow passed by on the other side and I suddenly understood. There was a garden on the other side, there had to be. A deep rich secret garden, filled with shadows and dark green foliage with a fountain glistening in the dappled sunlight. The window was for those on the other side, placed there to catch a glimpse of who might be passing by without being seen themselves, a portal from the cool refreshing unknown to the hot dusty street.                                                             For a photographer the back story of an image can be as pleasurable as the image itself. The possibilities are one of the things a photographer sees even when they may not be there.