Annalia S.'s photos with the keyword: shadow

Most of my life I have been a night owl. If I got to work at 9:00 a.m., it would be 11:00, if not noon, by the time my brain actually started moving at anything like the required speed and my most productive time was always in the late afternoon and into the evening. Not anymore. Old turkey that I am getting to be, by 4:00, 4:30 p.m., with at least another hour left in my work day, I start losing concentration and making mistakes. So I step outside for a 10 minute break, to clear my head, think of something else. This time of year, with the autumn colors in the nearby park and the resident birds cleaning up the berries on the courtyard bushes, I find plenty of sights to divert my attention from work matters. On this particular day, however, I had no sooner stepped outside that my photographer’s eye caught something that sent me scampering back upstairs. “That was a mighty short break ….” commented my colleague. I grabbed my camera out of my purse and promised to explain later. Light, you see, doesn’t leave you time for chit chat if you want to catch it at the right time. What you see here is the deeply ridged driveway ramp that leads down to the underground garage at my work place. Just before setting below the nearby land features, the light from the sun was coming in at a low angle and illuminating only the very top of the ridges. A lone fallen leaf from a nearby tree, still in its pretty autumn livery, seemed to have chosen this particular spot as a final resting place, going out in style with a little help from the westering sun. I am always thrilled by this kind of images, where mundane, everyday things turn out to have a claim to beauty. They remind me of the advice my art teacher father would obsessively give his students: “The subject matter of your best work will always be what you see around you everyday, the stuff you can picture in detail even with your eyes closed, that you know as intimately as the inside of your pockets.” As his students were rural kids, what they knew best were cows, chickens, barns, the woods, the mountains. They usually balked, at least at first, at this advice. “That’s boring stuff! “ they complained, “we want to draw interesting things, you know, stuff like spaceships, castles and unicorns, airplanes and race cars …” But, of course, he was right: their pictures of far away places and things they knew little about lacked detail, were naive and even a bit ridiculous or at best commonplace. By contrast, an oil painting by one of his students, featuring a maze of ink-black, intricate tree boles in the woods, with leaves in lurid colors that seemed to be flying in your face, was for years the centre piece on our living room wall. It had a dark, ominous quality that told the story of an adventure turned dangerous, of having wandered too deep into the woods and lost your way, of a familiar place turned scary when a storm hid the sun and plunged it in darkness. To this day, I still see that painting clearly in my mind’s eye.

The shadow of a park lamp on a blue fence that bars entry to a work in progress area along the banks of the river. In the PIPs: people on both banks seem to enjoy stopping to watch the work and comment. HFF everybody and have a great weekend, with no droopiness, no "blues", no work in progress detaining you!

In case you are wondering ... here's what's going on in this shot: In Florence, recycle bins for glass are large, squarish, blue containers, to be found at street corners, parking lots, etc. They have an opening at the top, big enough for most glass bottles, but not for larger items. Here, somebody evidently needed to dispose of a large glass pane inscribed here and there with the word love in various languages. Unable to fit it in the opening at the top, they just rested it against the bin and left it there, wrong side out, so that the words appear as their specular reflection. The late afternoon sun then projected shadows of the words against the bin. Finally, a curious photographer came along and decided this would work to show that sometimes art can be the result of a string of totally random chances :)))

Tree shadows on my garden wall. Yesterday Covid took Italian photographer Giovanni Gastel. A fashion photographer by profession, with a polished but original style, he was also well known around the world for his black and white portraits of famous public figures including one of President Obama. www.giovannigastel.it He was 65.

Spring brings new life and playful light to my garden.

The low winter sun shining through a fence reinforced with a fiberglass screen. HFF to all out there! Wish you a colorful, light filled weekend!

A flag (Italians fly the national colors to show unity in the face of the pandemic) and morning shadows on the brick walls of a condominium. HFF and a great weekend to all!

A light beam filtering through a tree canopy casts the shadow of a brave little plant growing next to an old concrete side walk, putting it, for a brief moment, in the spotlight.

The light at the end of the day shines through an ornate fence casting a squiggly shadow on a cobblestoned driveway in a small hamlet just outside the city of Florence. Freed from the worst of the lockdown strictures, I have finally been able to resume my "fence-hunting". I know you, of all people, will appreciate just how good that feels ... :))) Happy Fence Friday to everyone!

Sunbeams, shadows and reflections as the sun peeks over the neighbourhood roofs in the morning. I really need to clean this mirror better, but the wipe streaks made for an interesting effect ... ;) I think it does better on black.

This shot is from a few years ago, but I thought it would work to wish everyone a fun holiday season. This is in the little town where I was born and raised, in northern Italy, where arched porticos are common since the weather is often inclement.

In the mid-morning light an estivating snail casts a long shadow.