The Little Unseen Things

Yeah. So I was going to post an entry about watermelon, but I still need to work some more on that one. In the meantime, allow me to draw your attention to this obsession of mine about photos and things from past trips.

It's difficult to describe in a single sentence, but I'd say it's probably best summarized as a peculiar attention to details most people see as unimportant. For instance, consider a photo taken through a window. I might open such a photo to look at the reflections of the person taking the photo, the camera used, and anything else nearby that might be sufficiently lit to show in the glass.

Starting to get some idea of what I'm describing? Good. I'm going to demonstrate what I mean, using two actual examples. Here are two photographs, each followed by some of my thoughts and actions after viewing them, roughly in the order that they occur.

Example 1: Sprinkler Rays

I was walking to class one morning and I noticed that the sunlight was making very nice patterns in the spray from the sprinklers. So I stopped, moved to the edge of the sidewalk, whipped out my camera, and shot a few photos. I cannot remember exactly when this was, but from the apparent angle of the rays, I might guess that it was around 9.

In the background is a yellow fire hydrant, bringing to my mind the argument about whether fire hydrants were red or yellow. There was a red fire hydrant on campus, somewhere to the northwest.

The tree on the left had a branch sawed off one day. I heard the thud as the branch hit the ground and all. That day was mostly cloudy. The tree whose leaves are hanging down here on the right had some interesting seed pods. In my quest to find out the origin of fluffies, I recall collecting a few of these seed pods to examine. Further south was a large tree frequented by crows. On one instance, as I approached the tree, what must have been a hundred of them took to the air at once. It was a sight to behold (and it startled the crap out of me).

The little black dots on the ground were little spiky fruits that dropped from a few trees on campus. I don't recall anybody getting hit, despite the fact that two or three could fall in the time it took to walk under one of these trees.

The tree trunk on the right blocks out a library window on the building in the background (the library). Light conspires to create a ghostly shape in front of the window to its left. It's a triangle that's pretty close to being equilateral.

Example 2: Mount Hood

We went on a hike. We're standing on "Tom, Dick, and Harry Mountain". In front of us is Mount Hood, and below is Mirror Lake. This was the same hike on which I couldn't help but think about Mariokart-esque shortcuts as we walked on winding paths through the forest. This was the same hike on which we observed a helicopter dumping stuff into Mirror Lake. This was the same hike on which I skipped a big rock (and a team of some others rolled a boulder) into Mirror Lake.

There is, sadly, not much significant information that can be milked from the insignificant details in this drawing. However, allow me to draw your attention to this screenshot from an insignificant spot in Google Earth:

You can download the placemark if you have Google Earth.

It's amazing how much stuff you can do with that program. I actually managed to find a similar screenshot for one of the scenes from our orchestra's European concert tour in 2004.