Winter Abundance

Winter Abundance digital photography by Meera Rao 

I saw these berries weighing down the holly tree branch on my walk last week. For some reason the birds have not found that tree yet.  I understand cold winter frost makes the otherwise poisonous berries edible for the birds. 

Taking the photographs often is a lesson or practice sessions for me in how to compose, to get closer look at vast range in colors, light-shadow and variety of textures.  Sometimes I wonder though whether the camera makes me lazy about really paying attention to all that because  now I can just go back and refer the photos whenever I have a doubt, erasing a compelling reason to really observe for long or commit to memory much of the details......  

My curiosity lead me to research how and in what way photography changed paintings, in style and subject matter.  I came across some very interesting information in an article 'Painting and Photography'  written by Nancy Roth for Answers.com. : Photography arrived at a point in the history of European painting when Romanticism, as embodied in the turbulent fictions and exotic allegories of figures such as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), was widely admired and commercially successful; realism, the painting of immediate visual experience, was beginning to coalesce into an oppositional movement, championed by the brash young Gustave Courbet (1819-77). Neither of these painters saw photography as a threat to painting. They, and others later, quickly embraced it as a means of referencing such details as facial expression, ephemeral light effects, and motion. Delacroix even wrote in his journal that ‘if a man of genius should use the daguerreotype as it ought to be used, he will raise himself to heights unknown to us’. Some painters, notably Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, themselves became accomplished photographers. It was rather the popular Salon painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), celebrated for the technical precision of his work, who reportedly declared, on seeing his first daguerreotype, "From today painting is dead "   

I am so glad he was wrong :)