December 3, 2011

This sort of subject does not lend itself to "try hard" photography. Often, if I try hard enough, I can overcome my lack of phytography skills by trying lots of options. But when things get really hard (red vase with red berries in white windowsill), trying hard isn't good enough. How to make the reds in the plant material and vase more dominant than the whites in the windowsill? Beats me. If I had more time, I'd just move the arrangement to a different windowsill.

                                                          

The winterberry is from yesterday's arrangement, the red cube-like vase from day-before-yesterday's arrangement. The moss is from the garden, and that's important to say. I am annoyingly outspoken on the subject of harvesting moss from public forests or other people's land. That is a no-no. I harvest it from a spot in my own yard where I know how fast it grows back, and I never harvest more than will reappear by the next season (sometimes sooner).  But know I'm not really on high moral ground here. Every time I use a plant material that could be overharvested from an ecosystem, I know I am encouraging others to harvest it from elsewhere. The winterberry, too, is from my garden, but I know how tempting it is to harvest winterberry from the wild. My fingers are itching to pick some along the Ashland Trolley Line, but so far I've resisted.