Project 52 (17 of ?)

Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn. ~Elizabeth Lawrence

Project 52 Revisited

Photo Taken 12 October 2008

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. ~Carol Bishop Hipps

Project 52 (15 of 52)

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

Project 52 (14 of 52)

Okay, now I can see a difference in our friend the oak tree. How spring has sprung. Do you see that Warwickshire Gold in the background?
Here's a better view. The whole of our county is a patchwork of gold and green. Beautiful.

Project 52 (13 of 52)

What's all this about April showers then? What's with the snow?

Project 52 (12 of 52)

Can you see that first glimpse of spring in the background? There's just a blaze of yellow starting up in the rapeseed field in the distance. Disgusting name, but pretty flowers. The whole county will be overflowing with golden rolling hills in a week or two and it always makes me want to dress up in a bumblebee costume and sing Blind Melon songs.

P.S. Did you know that's where canola oil comes from? Rapeseed oil was first marketed in the States from Canada - Can-ola, get it?

Project 52 (11 of 52)

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! ~John Muir

Project 52 (9 and 10 of 52)

1st March, 2008

9th March, 2008

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. ~Marcel Proust

Are you as surprised as I am at how little change there has been in my tree over the past three months? Click on the tag below to see all the other offerings from project 52.

Project 52 (8 of 52)

'God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying Ah!'

Joseph Campbell

photo 24th Feb, 2008.

Project 52 (7 of 52)

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off."
-Willa Cather

Project 52 (5 and 6 / 52)

"Oak trees come from acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another."
-- Shirley Ann Grau

Project 52 (4 / 52)

"I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines."
-Henry David Thoreau

Project 52 (3 / 52)

The thing that I always find so fascinating about the English landscape is that every bit of it has been crafted by man. This old tree was probably planted by somebody's grandfather on land that's been intensively farmed for a couple thousand years. There's a Roman road that runs about a mile from here, that was built originally in 43 AD to connect the Northeast of England with the Southwest (from Lincoln to Ilcester in Somerset) and for the first few decades after the Roman invasion of Britain, it marked the Western frontier of the Roman empire. I now drive it to work everyday, past the old Roman town near Chesterton that was inhabited until the 4 th century AD, past the windmill that was built in 1632, and over the more modern feat of engineering, the M40 motorway. I hadn't really thought about it before, but that's two thousand years of history on my 20 minute commute. Amazing.

Project 52 (1 and 2 / 52)

Did you ever see the movie Smoke? The one with Harvey Keitel and Forest Whitaker? I think it's from the early 90's.... There's this bit in it, where an old man takes a photo out the window of his apartment of the Brooklyn street corner down below, at the same time of day, every day, for some 30 years. I always liked this idea of documenting a mundane or ordinary subject and watching how it slowly changes over time and it's been somewhere in the back of my mind ever since. I just never managed to stay in the same place long enough to ever let it come to fruition for me.

Now that I'm settled here in Warwickshire, I thought I'd finally start my own project. I'm not diligent enough for an everyday sort of endeavor, but I think I can just about manage once a week. Here's my subject, this old oak tree in a field down the road from our house. I aim to shoot it at around the same time on the same day every week. I can't wait to see how it turns out at the end of the year....

Here's week one (above) and week two (below) of Project 52. Enjoy!