Ross Belot
Bow River Paddle BW
In some mountain pictures the mountain is discreet. Think for a moment about The Great Wave off Kanagawa; the Hokusai Great Wave. A woodblock print which has always enjoyed mainstream popularity, a picture you’ve seen everywhere; transferred to mugs, tattooed to man-boobs. Chemists like the story of the Prussian blue pigment which it featured, mathematicians like to use the sharp foam on the wave as a example of fractal structure, and pedants will remind you that the Hokusai Great Wave is actually a picture of a mountain, from Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
Sometimes it is so easy to miss the mountain which is standing right in front of you.
The mountain in Ross’s photograph is totally discreet, fading away into the background. It does not try to steal the story from the boat, or the river, or the ripples, those stabbing fir trees get double the drama with their reflected spikes. It knows that the viewing eyes will flow towards it eventually. That’s one confident mountain.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Rachel Irving and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
