Green on Green In Black and White

It is now the time of year when I enter both temperamental and photographic aestivation: that state of hot-weather torpor  typical of some terrestrial turtles. When conditions become too extreme for them to be in the presence of other turtles and remain civil; when they grow peevish and irritable with the humidity and the heat, they bury themselves in mud until things cool down and the sky opens up again, come fall.

I look over my photo archives going back 14 years to the beginning of my digital lens-life. From the weight of my archives month by year, during the summer months, you’d think I’d been put into cryogenic storage: few images can be found at all, while albums from spring and autumn on either side of the longest days, the green-on-greenest days, are full.

I’ve said it here before: I give up the ghost in hot weather. All pretense at ambition is cast off; lassitude rules. The drive to do any given thing is suppressed by recoil from the possibility of overheating–a thermal state all too easy to achieve for a Bama-bred deep-southerner who never learned to sweat.

But beyond that climate-linked ennui, there is the matter, for this casual but persistent landscape and nature photographer, to be overwhelmed by far too much green and far too much close-in-ness to be called to the outdoors with images in mind. So cameras go idle in the months that do not have an “r” in them.

So it occurs to me on the cusp of my annual aestivation that I should commit, for June through September, and with a few possible exceptions of the season including insects, to shift–when I muster the will to move and press a shutter–to black and white. This will put the emphasis on the form and texture rather than on more green-on-green until autumn comes.

I will aim for one B & W keeper a week. Here’s the first. Click HERE to BiggiFY.