Who doesn't love parallel lines?

Someone I spoke with recently mentioned they liked the picture from the middle of the night on the sand prairie. I have a whole bunch of them and they are all very grainy and none of them are of much use for anything other than reminding me of how peaceful winter nights are. Since I'm not doing anything else with them, I guess I'll throw one up here every once in a while. So here's another one. I like leaves but branches look much better without them. Tree branches are what lightning becomes when it gets sick of the jet set and just wants to chill out.

Mundane, ordinary objects are the things that fascinate me. I think the fascination goes back to my "form follows function" comments on the playground equipment. It seems to me like most things are designed to split the road between form and function but the things I like best are the things that are made purely for function. Ordinary things like the pipes in a factory ceiling or a dirty glass become beautiful because of their usefullness. Even on an industrial scale it's still a more organic kind of beauty. This glass, however, has a completely pointless etched pattern in the bottom in brazen defiance of my entire statement. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but art is merely a failure to resolve contradictions without juxtaposition. I wonder if that means that artists have a heightened sense of irony. I'll have to ask one.

This is a personal favorite of mine taken in St. Cloud, MN. I have other pictures of just the ducks. They kept trying to climp the dam and sliding back down.

Diffuse and broken shadows across a medium contrast pattern such as that of the skin of this gourd is something I can't resist taking a picture of. This is a picture that, I think, looks better smaller because on a larger scale it becomes visually confusing.

I find playground equipment is always really fascinating, visually. I have a 4 year old son so I find myself at playgrounds often. There is always something to snap a photo of. I think of playgrounds as a window to what life could be like. The best form always follows function, but what if the function is fun? Then the form can be nearly anything.

Taken in the park near my house these leaves were originally captured in color. I have the color photo still and while the colors are vibrant and a bit mad really I still like the sepia toned phot better. In sepia you get a much better sense of the shadows and the patterns on the leaves look like shark skin.

Something I tend to rather like is the photographic equivalent of a non-sequitur. This is an out of focus photograph of a drawing by me which was under the glass of my desktop. Did that description help you understand the photo? I hope not. It has no meaning or emotion. It's just the fuzzy little tip of an iceberg made of nothing whatsoever. I suppose, then, the emotion I'm really trying to evoke here is a state of non-plus malaise... maybe?

This cat pretends to love me. I know, however, that if I died in my sleep he'd be eating me before sunrise.

Some sausages cooking around Christmas '06

Long ago I went out to a sand prairie preserve in MN in the middle of the night to take pictures. It was just me and the trees in the darkness. There are a lot of pictures from that night that I really like. Not many of them are very good but they all remind me of one thing. Silence. When it's cold, and you are in the middle of nowhere in MN there is no noise.

Taken on a cold and rainy August day at Clemens Gardens in St. Cloud, MN.  I just enjoy the depressing greyness of it.  If brighten it up a bit it's actually a cheerful picture.  That, however, is no fun since the whole reason I snapped the picture in the first place is because it looked depressing.

Occasionally I will change the picture of mine at the top of this page as an irregular attempt to impress you.  I decided to start it off by posting a picture my wife took.  That's how I roll.