Morning Ritual - a reading (on YouTube)
Dark
seeds blossom,
Love
bruises black.
Souls
ascend another massacre,
The
Little Death.
Liquid
people within
a glass skin,
Consume
the morning’s bouquet,
And
live.
08/01
©
2017 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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Similar to earlier in the year, I am posting a pair poems today and an essay related to them.
You can find more background on this poem in the companion essay “Lughnasa 2017 – Two Short Poems” on the Noddfa Imaginings blog for essays.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeletePhotographing a steaming cup of coffee is tough. Or rather, capturing the steam above a cup of coffee is tough, the cup itself is pretty easy to photograph. We bought a clear mug just for the photo and set the shot up in the dinning room. The cup is lit from one side with an LED work light. From the front is it lit by a regular table lamp. And behind the cup, propped in chair, is my large diffuser with the black face showing. I spent about 15 minutes taking pictures of the empty cup, to decide what I liked in terms of angle and composition. Then we made a cup of coffee, and poured it in, took a couple shots.... and no steam showed. None. Sigh. Not enough temperature contrast and too much humidity in the room.
Now go back eight years to a cold February morning at breakfast. That morning the sun was streaming in the front window and the stream from my coffee was beautiful. If you got close you could see the individual vapor drops rising from the cup. That morning I got out my camera and snapped a few pictures. They were kind of washed out (I was shooting into the sun after all) but some were good and I filed them away to be forgotten.
It was those pictures that I used for the steam. I copied out the steam from two different images, darkened the backgrounds and copied them into the new picture. I trimmed all the excess black space from around the steam, scaled it to the new cup size, massaged the shape just a tiny bit and may it a little transparent. Voila! A steaming cup of coffee... at 10:30 at night... because I needed to be able to control all the light in the dinning room to get the look right. The only way that was going to happen was after dark. I'm happy with how it came out.