A Tree Full of Butterflies

The brisk Autumn winds
rustle the leaves taking death
leaving the dying.


Sunlight filtered gold
a tree full of butterflies
fluttering nowhere.

Gettysburg Battlefield in Autumn: Part 6-Fences

Part 1 "Fog" is here.

Part 2 "Nature" is here.

Part 3 "Roads & Paths and Self Portraits" is here.

Part 4 "Monuments and Graphic Design" is here.

Part 5 "The Power of the Monuments" is here.

This is the last of the themed posts. After this, all that is left is the best of the photos taken with my trusty blackberry and some miscellaneous images. I don't usually have many themes in mind when I set out to create images. This shoot was a little different in that I intended to try to capture the fog. Beyond that, I simply look for things that catch my eye. I enjoy looking back through the images and seeing what I didn't necessarily see at the time, themes that I might have been working on unawares. 

Most of the Gettysburg Battlefield is a patchwork of fences. The notable exception would be Little Roundtop. Otherwise, this land was family farms. Many of the fences were simply to mark boundaries between one farm and the next. Some, to keep livestock from wandering. Those, would primarily be the straight picket fences. Some of the stone walls were created when farmers cleared the land, piling the stones turned over by the plows along the edges of the fields. Some of the stone walls and the zig-zagging sharp picket fences were hastily built by the armies to use as cover.  All of them, wood and stone alike, give the landscape a geometry. Individually, they have the ability to create a frame for the somber beauty and draw your eye in to the scene. I wonder as I look at them, touch them, steady myself on them, and photograph them, Did a soldier steady his weapon on the same plank that I now use to steady my camera? How many men died where I stand today? 

I find them to be simple, yet elegant; functional and beautiful at the same time.  Like the trees and the rocks that have been here since before the battle began, they were witnesses. If only they could talk...

 

Gettysburg Battlefield in Autumn: Part 3-Roads and Paths, Self Portraits

My series of photographs taken at the Gettysburg Battlefield in Autumn continues with two smaller sets of images. The themes for today are "Roads and Paths" and "Self Portraits".

Part One-Fog is here.

Part Two-Nature is here.

Both of today's themes are recurring ones for me.  The more often I make the time to do this sort of thing (spend a chunk of time shooting in one location either alone or with another photographer) the more I find myself revisiting certain main themes.  Roads and paths is a big one for me. Self portraits is possibly the biggest. I have put them together here for two reasons. First of all, they are smaller groups of images that fit nicely together in one post. More importantly, however, they go together in that I take self portraits in an effort to try to see myself from the outside; see where I am headed. The roads and paths are symbolic of that journey. For that reason, they usually curve out of sight, disappearing around the next bend. For most of us, we have a vague idea where we are headed but often in life where we really end up is not anywhere we would have guessed.

Gettysburg Battlefield in Autumn: Part 2-Nature

Part one of my Autumnal Gettysburg photo shoot was devoted to the fog. Today is part two, nature. The land around the battlefield (where not already developed when the battlefield became a National Park) remains in a completely wild and natural state. On the morning of this shoot I startled two whitetail deer at the edge of the woods near the one end of Cemetery Ridge. Unfortunately, Mother Nature has done a phenomenal job with camouflage and I was unable to get a decent shot of them (a doe and fawn for the record).

The beauty here is not just in the somber monuments but often in the often overlooked displays large and small of time, and nature, moving on.