Yesterday morning while wandering through the kitchen I saw these two tomatoes sitting on the counter with their split stem, and just had to go get my camera and do some still lives. I turned a closer shot into paintings in three different styles yesterday, but this is the shot I originally saw, before I even went for the camera. There is something about the variations in greens when compared to the red of the fruit that really catches my eye. Then too, I found the subtle molding of the tomatoes by the mix of ceiling and window light very attractive.

Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill.  24mm macro plus 1.5x digital tel-extender. f3.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. (And who would have believed, even two years ago, that a small sensor P&S like the Canon could produce this kind of quality at 1250 ISO??) Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, using my hyper-real preset.

And for the Sunday thought. Almost all my posts over the past month have been images from my last trip…to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and then the same valley in New Mexico. Birds, bugs, and landscapes in the bright, dramatic southwestern light. That is because we are having a totally uninteresting winter in Maine…photographically. Sunny days with no clouds over bare trees and brown landscapes…or murky days with a mix of rain and snow and very low light levels. I have gotten a few squirrel shots out the back door, and I put up a feeder and filled it with high quality seed…but apparently there is still so much fodder left in the bare woods and hedges that the local birds are not greatly tempted by my feeding station. When they come, it is always  when the light is lowest, just before or just after a bout of rain with a few snow flakes mixed in.

I am not complaining. Really. I have been spending time building ebooks of the Bosque, my local Rachel Carson shots, and, currently, of pictures taken over the past several years in and around Acadia National Park. Still, I am getting an itch for new images. Which is why the tomatoes appealed so strongly.

I need to be creating. Oh, building ebooks might be considered a creative task in some sense…but it is more curative than creative…and not really a satisfying substitute. I need to newly frame the world and press the shutter button and process the results into a new image. I need to do that. It is a hunger. It is a spiritual hunger. I need it not for today’s life but for the eternal life that is in me. I need it to be who I am in the spirit.

And that is why the tomatoes caught my eye. And that Is why I am sharing them with you. 🙂

Happy Sunday! And may you find today, that which satisfies the creative spirit within you.