There’s something about a flower that makes me want to take its picture. Sometimes I feel like a horrible friend: I’ll visit a person I haven’t seen in years, and I don’t take a single picture of them- or their kids, or their family, or us together, or their pets… Then we stop at a park or botanic garden and out comes the camera.
Don’t you love black and white? Instead of the focus being on a flower head or its vivid color, suddenly everything becomes just a shape. A shadow possesses as much substance as the object beside it. You become the maestro of an abstract composition. Beauty appears in surprising places: the crook of an elbow, a doorjamb, a hairbrush. Literally seeing the world in black and white is a good reminder that beauty is all around us; we just have to notice it.
Photo: a dozen roses