OK, I kinda missed the season on this one, but you get ’em as I find ’em. This was on the same roll as the Atlas Plastic strikers, so it must have been taken in September of 1966.
This is what’s called “wild art” in the business. It’s a feature shot with no real news peg. I don’t think it ever ran, so I wasted a few minutes of time and three or four frames of film that were going to be processed anyway.
Following rules can make for dull photos
This photo breaks several of the normal snapshotter rules that say you should always have the sun at your back and never shoot into it. Those are good rules, but they also make for dull photos.
In this case, I let the foreground detail go dark, creating a partial silhouette effect. I was hoping that the backlighted smoke would separate the subjects from the background, which it did. I like the composition of the woman holding her rake down, while the boy on the left has his pitchfork up in the air.
I wish the boy with the cart had been half a step to the left, but the other elements were missing when HE was in the right spot. This wouldn’t be a good picture if you wanted to be able to identify the people in it, but it’s captures the feeling of raking and burning leaves in the late afternoon.
Ah, the smell of burning leaves and before that the big piles of leaves to run and jump into! I did that for years living in Cape and then the Chicago area, until the pleasure police made it unlawful to burn leaves and simply sent the garage trucks to vaccum them up from the curb or bagged them for pickup. No great piles of leaves and no fires with the smell of burning leaves throughout the neigborhood, all gone.
Now I complain when the plam frans fall on the lawn and I have to go and throw them in the garbage can…special GREEN one’s without regular trash and only picked up on Thrusday’s. What I really want to do is to save them and THEN have nice fire in the driveway…seems the locals down here have the same opinion of fires in the open as they do in Chicago. Seems the fire trucks can get to my house in about 3 minutes after a neighbor calls and says “the Street is on fire!”.
Ken,
My husband and I do photography as a serious hobby and enjoy so much your professional comments on taking your photos. We look forward to more/
Marcia
It is art. Pure and simple.
out here in the desert during dry season, which is most of the time , if you want to burn wvwn your beehive fireplace, on the patio, you had better be standing by with a hot dog on a stick, cooking or keeping warm is the only reason for a fire