Carpe Diem Extra 2018-11-16
Testing a New Linking Widget
I finished this haiku trilogy after
Contemplation ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #160
closed. That’s OK. Can’t rush barbecue.
Waves #1
Waves wash things ashore:
bouyant trash from far away,
driftwood, and sea weed.
Waves #2
Synchronize your breath
with the ebb and flow of waves.
Feel the ocean’s pulse.
Waves #3
Contemplate them all:
driftwood, sea weed, even trash.
Insights ride the waves.
Like still photos, many haiku capture a moment in time. My first foray into capturing motion in haiku yielded 2 surprises. Here comes another, in time for the centennial on 11-11 of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I.
Let’s start by summarizing the older surprises that I posted in response to a CDHK episode. Credits for the images below are at the end of this post for readability.
The first surprise was that that so much motion could fit in a haiku:
Redemptive Trickle
A shell exploded!
Water slowly filled the hole
and held the whole sky.
Of course, my haiku that is like a movie was inspired by this classic World War I haiku that is like a still photo:
© Maurice Betz
A shell hole
In its water
Held the whole sky.
The second surprise was that I did not have a stable preference between these haiku. Like someone viewing the classic ambiguous image that can be seen as a duck facing one way or as a rabbit facing the other, I flip-flopped between the still photo by Betz and the movie by me. So did at least 2 readers of my old post.
Here is the new third surprise. After writing yet another shell hole haiku, I finally have a stable preference. My preferred haiku is like a movie that starts after the explosion:
Healing Trickle
Water slowly filled
the shell blast’s muddy crater.
It held the whole sky.
Unable to find appropriate and affordable period images, I used contemporary images: a generic explosion and a puddle that looks much like the water-filled shell hole. The puddle photo has been cropped to be more nearly square.
This post ends with 2 haiku, each inspired by a photo of clouds imitating clams. I took the calm photo; Sue Ranscht took the dramatic one.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Pastel Colors
Tho I usually prefer deeply saturated colors, I love the pastel pink and green sometimes seen in a cloud, when the angles are just right in the triangle formed by the cloud and the sun and the viewer. At my latitude, it is a rare sight. I have had just one chance to photograph the elusive synergy of pastel pink and green:
Dramatic photos of pink and green in clouds can be seen by searching online for
[mother-of-pearl clouds] or [nacreous clouds].
There is also the marvel by Sue Ranscht that appears below. Fair warning: the image credit links to a post in a series, with a striking image for each episode in a fantasy epic. The series is so addictive that it hooked me despite my aversion to fantasies and impatience with epics.
© Sue Ranscht | Space, Time, and Raspberries
Emptiness ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #153
Carpe Diem’s Quest For A (New) Masterpiece
#3 the quest continues
My latest haiku came quickly when I saw a superb photo by Cee Neuner. While I gave the haiku a title to make it intelligible w/o the photo, I also requested and received permission to share the photo in a post.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Teal, Aqua, Seafoam or Turquoise
What would I say is “the” color of the cloth in my image? Even more than with other colors, how it looks depends on lighting and surroundings. This pretty color is a visual metaphor: relationships mean more than intrinsic properties.
Colorful Plain English
Inkjets squirt cyan;
some poets sing of turquoise.
I just see blue-green.
For most purposes, I prefer blue-green (and 2 variations on it) over the other names. Anybody who knows what blue and green mean can guess what blue-green means. Those who need more choices for naming colors like this can put blue-green between bluish green (AKA aqua) and greenish blue (AKA turquoise). The 3 names I prefer are all clearer than names like aqua about where they lie on the range from just plain blue to just plain green.
Need still more choices? Use Red|Green|Blue coordinates. The 256x256x256 possible values for the RGB coordinates of a color can make more distinctions than U will ever need.
For example, the image below is a detail from the image above, with little yellow circles around 2 spots on the cloth, one relatively bright and another relatively dark. Most spots on the cloth have [R|G|B] between the bright spot’s [45|223|226] and the dark spot’s [0|48|86].
If U like one of those colors enough to want it as a text or background color, U can use the corresponding hexadecimal code (#2DDFE2 or #003056) in an HTML style sheet. Explicit hex codes avoid the bother of remembering the sometimes flaky conventional names for web colors.
Hex codes also provide flexibility. Colors rarely look the way one expects when picking a color by pointing to it in another context, as I noticed when I used colors from an image to add a haiku to the image and then to write text referring to parts of the haiku. Bumping coordinates up or down can adjust colors to look good in actual use.
