Unplugging at the park

A couple of weeks ago was Veteran’s Day, for which I got a Friday off from work. Geralyn and Sam were going to some Mom’s group gathering, though, so I was faced with the prospect of the whole morning and most of the afternoon to myself. What I really wanted to do was park my lazy self in front of the TV and play video games until I slipped into some kind of torpid slug state, but my conscience got the better of me. So instead I packed up my gear and headed out to a local park to stretch my legs and engage in a little photography.

This particular area was actually a kind of sculpture park where they had all kinds of oversized artworks on display. Most of them looked like some giant had chewed up a bunch of I- beams and spit them out in a big metallic lump, but it gave me a chance to shoot something that wasn’t a toddler.

Like at the Chihuly exhibit I wrote about a while back, I found that the wide angle shots of the sculptures failed to produce anything resembling an interesting photograph. There was too much going on in the scene and the overcast skies didn’t exactly look appealing, either. So instead, I tried to isolate parts of the sculpture and capture a sense of scale through different angles:

A couple of the most interesting shots, like the ones below, were of a statue that had been wrapped in a green cloth for the winter, mostly because it looked kind of eerie. Like some mafia informant caught in the last instant before he met his end. The picture on the right below is actually my favorite from the whole trip. It’s a shot of the wrapped statue’s reflection in the algae-filled pool below.

And speaking of surreal, there was this shot of a giant, white, cowboy cutout (#2968443) inexplicably posing in the woods, as well as the statue that had yellow propellers jutting out of it so that it was hard to see where its face should have been. Sometimes you’re just walking along and you see stuff like that and you think “What the…? Where’s my camera?” Fortunately I had one.

The main problem with this outing was that it was a really overcast day, with rainclouds glowering at me but never quite working up the gumption to dump. The clouds really diffused what sunlight there was, which had good and bad effects on photography. The good is that there was less harsh light and fewer stark shadows, which is generally desireable. The bad is that the colors in the scenes around me weren’t, as a rule, too vibrant. Still, I did manage to spot a few places where color really popped. One was a blue sculpture against a backdrop of bright yellow leaves. The other was a trio of trees that still hadn’t shed their foliage yet:

Speaking of leaves, it was kind of getting late in the Fall season, so that many of the trees had dumped their leafy load. I tried a lot of shots of leaves that day, raning from giant fields and walkways covered entirely in leaf blankets to close-ups of leaves on a pale blue picnic table. Here’s a couple that I kind of liked:

And finally, to wrap things up, here’s a couple of fairly colorless shots taht I found kind of interesting in the way that they isolated parts of larger works. One was a giant collection of steel balls and the other was part of a concrete pit shaped like a smiling face. Freaky.

Anyway, the day turned out to be more fun than staying at home to play games, plus I was reminded of how nice it is to just break away, unplug, and spend some time by yourself out in the woods, away from your computer. So that you can, you know… go home and upload pictures of it to your computer and share them online.