I am pretty sure that I mentioned Marc to this group. I have always enjoyed his photographs.

The itinerant herds wandering the suburbs fear most the civic authorities. Bedford, if I remember, had to cull a couple of hundred deer the other year. There’s a certain what-me-worry? quality about the ones I see. They have very little to fear as long as they stay away from major streets as local animal wardens deal with stray dogs. Fecundity and rapid maturation trump thinking as the chosen survival strategy.

More and less. If I’m driving down a back-of-my-hand road I might be responding to a template that is composed of what I know and what I experiencing at the time. Sometimes what I remember will trump what I am experiencing – one reason why careful managers will put up signs informing traffic of any changes in lights at intersections etc. An again, it might be a matter of where,and on what your attention is drawn. That’s a huge question.

I like the sequence idea, may have to steal it. If I had the time (and patience), I’d keep the camera in one place all day.

The deer are also plentiful here, and just as dumb. A couple days ago, the one I was watching ahead of me chose to run across just in front of an oncoming truck. I’ve had some fairly close calls, but no collisions yet. We also have cattle and a few moose to worry about, and those Angus are black.

I’m wondering if accidents are more likely in familiar or unfamiliar territory. And if we see more in a picture of a familiar or unfamiliar subject.

Don Juan wanted Carlos to scan his environment, constantly moving his attention and touching lightly on its details. A real font of knowledge that Don Juan.

We’re talking too about a way of driving, where one picks out the most distant relevant elements in one’s field of view and, using that as an anchor, the driver makes a construction of everything between that anchor and himself. It’s not so much a matter of observing that field in detail, but rather of assigning a kind of priority to it. I don’t know if Montana deer tend to jump out on the road, but they will and do around here with potentially disastrous results for all concerned. One can often spot them well up the road if one has turned to “deer” on the attention dial.

An idea: you know those frames that will display a sequence of images? Quite the thing around the holidays? Have the sequence be a single point of view with differential focusing. Not as easy as it sounds, I know. But things can be thrown in and out of focus on the computer.

Your description echoes one way I’ve thought of some of my work like this, especially the Sourdough Trail series. Namely, I like to think that the close-up views, with parts in focus and parts out of focus, are like what a squirrel or bird or other critter in the woods might see, peeping from a branch, perhaps. There is, I hope, the sense that these are momentary perceptions, and the next moment might bring another context or another focus of attention.

Birgit,

Reflections–that’s a lovely thought. I tend to think of them more as layers, but reflections are nice because they’re somehow a comment specifically directed back on another subject (e.g. the branches in focus). Here they’re sort of a reminder that there’s more in the environment beyond the main subject.

Looking at the blow-up of the last image, is changing my view on in- and out-of-focus objects in pictures. The soft branches, while they not actually are, make me think of reflections.

And the twigs cover the bare expanse of the sky.

These photos trigger a number of memories for me. One takes me back to a time in my youth when I took briefly to the mountains as a deer hunter. One way to stalk was to sit and allow the deer to come to you. This required discerning the target from the underbrush in a three dimensional manner, as one scanned into the brush as well as side to side. To this day I tend to treat visual fields this way, picking out details at different depths. Just a memory and not so much a comment on your photos. Numbers four and six where a background is superimposed directly upon the foreground do not permit that kind of focusing in depth, but rather provide interesting superimpositions as sharply registered twigs and branches acquire halos and various ghost partners.