Black and White Stalactites (click to enlarge)
This image comes from the Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns. The brighter stalactite formation on the left is named The Chandelier. The Big Room is the one you roam around during the self-guided tour. One could spend hours in the Big Room photographing the various formations.
I like the black and white version of this image much better than the color one. The black and white image places emphasis on all of the pointy stalactites. In the color image, the points kind of get lost within the natural brown and tan colors.
Carlsbad Caverns: N32 10 38.97 W104 26 34.32
Sea Glass in a Bottle (click to enlarge)
This image shows sea glass in a bottle. The sea glass comes from the beach at Scituate, Massachusetts. The bottle was something we picked up at an antique shop somewhere along the way.
This is another garage studio project shot in my Fotodiox studio in a box. I started shooting the bottle from the side as it is covered in imperfections and had that wavy appearance common to old panes of glass. Given that the sea glass does not make much of a stack inside the bottle, shooting from the side did not accentuate the sea glass.
As I was moving the bottle around, I happened to look straight down the opening in the bottle. This view presented several interesting elements of composition. There is the round outline of the bottle itself, the imperfections and textures of the glass between the edge of the opening and the edge of the bottle, the blurred sea glass, the circular lip of the opening, and the sharply focused sea glass with their imperfections.
It is interesting that the bottle shows tints of the white, green, and brown sea glass depending on what area of the bottle you look at. Those tints keep the eye moving as it tries to associate those times with something elsewhere in the image.
Sea glass in a bottle: My garage
