Postcards from Real Life: Sharp

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

You can’t stop being a plant nerd even when you’re at the zoo. And this trifoliate orange at ZooAtlanta always fascinated me. And it turns out there’s a photography lesson for me in this image.

A million lifetimes ago, I used to spend a lot of time at Zoo Atlanta. The kids were young and it was a nice place to hang out. I can’t even begin to fathom how many hours we spent there so let’s simply call it a metric fuck ton.

In all of that time, we obviously got to know the place pretty well. As much as I enjoyed the animals, I’ve always been a plant nerd first and foremost. So I have a lot of plant pictures from all of our visits to the zoo as well as the critters.

And one of the plants that fascinated me the most was this one—the trifoliate orange. The thorns were hella massive—wicked two-inch long spikes. In fact, this shot doesn’t do them justice since this young branch is smaller than its full-grown counter parts.

But the trifoliate orange also had a thick, waxy, chaotic branching structure that wove its way around in disarray. Its bark was unlike anything I’ve seen before or since. Just an all-around cool and bizarre plant. This plant captured my curiosity to say the least.

I made this image very early in my dabblings with photography back in 2009. I have a bunch of other images of this plant—all of them quite awful from a technical and compositional photographic standpoints. This one is the best of the lot.

But I had to laugh in deciding to use it for this week’s theme. Because the composition is quite reminiscent of the image I shared a few weeks ago that I made in 2021 that is well-loved amongst my followers.

So looking at the two images made twelve years apart and at very different stages of my photographic journey, I can’t decide what the lesson is. The circular nature of life. Or to keep practicing. Or maybe that artistic style is somewhat innate. Or a little of everything maybe?

Cheers, friends! Stay sharp and curious.

Bluesky Art Show

This post is inspired by the Bluesky Art Show, a challenge to share artwork surrounding a weekly theme each Saturday.