Here is my entry for
August’s “Down on your Knees”
Picture This Photo Contest at
http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=7067

Cattail Sparklers. Typha latifolia

These fluffy, white seeds were once used for stuffing blankets,
pillows and toys. Native Americans would put them inside
moccasins and around cradles, for additional warmth,
but don’t talk to me about additional warmth
right now!

“This wonderful, poetic image stirs up all sorts of emotions, questions and intrigues, and at first glance left me with the impression that I must be seeing upward from under water.

In the larger version on his blog, you can see that the glowing, backlit cattail leaves and fuzzy seeds in the foreground are crispy sharp, which satisfies the eye’s need for an anchor and order, and sets up a visual tension that enhances one’s slightly voyeuristic sense of peering into a world where your presence is unseen and unnoticed.  Delicious!  We are watching from behind something, peering into a world not quite our own, and one that has a certain timeless, dreamlike, Alice-in-Wonderland quality to it.  Compositionally, there is the sun, the brightest part of the image where my eye starts its journey before traveling down those eye-leading, image-framing, diagonal flares to the brightest of the fluff below the little girl and then upward to her.  There is motion in the child at play, in her wispy hair, in the extended magic wand of a backlit cattail.  And winding up through all that, there is this receding, but traceable world of cattail fluff, extending from the razor sharp foreground, just inches away, upward and toward the sun, and off into the faint scattering breezes of the blue sky ether above the little girl’s head.  This image meets every one of the criteria set out in the contest parameters”.

Judge: David Perry

http://www.davidperryphoto.com/