Sendak's Sumac

In memory of Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild ThingsAre. Comments welcome.

--Lannie

Of course I could have dodged the hole in order to bring out the detail, but I chose to leave it mysterious. 

 

Next version?  Maybe I will dodge it.

 

--Lannie

Yes, you've caught some of the Sendak magic. I used to love to look at the illustrations in his books which were wonderfully sure-handed and imaginative and just a bit dark. There's also a hint of the stylized primitivism of Henri Rousseau in this picture.

Stylized primitivist.  Thanks, Jack.  Now I have a name.

 

--Lannie

I keep waiting to get sucked into the black hole in the middle:-)

It's been a long time since I've read that book....

The bits of red and, of course, the black hole are a fitting memoriam if memory serves.

Amy

Thanks for all the comments, guys.

 

As I said above, I thought about dodging that hole in PS (and there is/are a lot of data in there), but I decided to keep it dark (after applying a shallow S-curve and Levels in PS) for the mysterious effect.  This was shot looking very nearly straight down from the bridge.  Not all shots could be framed through the viewfinder, since I was holding (in some cases) the camera out at arm's length and hoping for the best--at varying apertures and focal lengths on the zoom.

 

Traffic was roaring  by a very few feet behind me, with no elevated walkway, and so the framing is hardly perfect--but I took a lot of shots and am hoping that, with 36 megapixels to work from, I can get an even more perfect crop.  Decisions as to what to do about post-processing of the other files (which I have yet to seriously scrutinize) remains open-ended at this point.  This was my first take on what I saw.

 

--Lannie

The river below me was the Pee Dee, which enters the Atlantic near Georgetown, SC, down the coast from Myrtle Beach on the way to Charleston.  Not too many miles upstream (closer to where I live), the river is the Yadkin, which becomes the Pee Dee after it merges with the Uwharrie River.  The very low Uwharrie "mountains" were clearly visible across the river from exactly where this was shot.

 

Hurricane Arthur was approaching the NC coast and would make landfall near midnight.  The wind had already shifted, but the weather was quite ordinary, if extraordinarily humid.

 

--Lannie