Curb Maps
Continuing with my yellow series from a walk in the rain last weekend. I have processed quite a number of curb paint photos in the past few days and am surprised at how many of them have footprints (like the one above) or tire marks, even though it was raining steadily.
To me these old yellow curbs look like cartography from a distant land. The one below may even include one of the fanciful old style map decorations. You know the ones – strange beasts at the margins of lands beyond the knowledge of the map maker. In this instance, a witch on a broom flies high over distant islands, or are they small continents?
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I must also give a shout out to WordPress. I had an email from a regular reader that my blog text was not zooming to a larger size in Chrome and Safari, although the pictures did enlarge. Since my eyesight is not the greatest I use this feature (ctrl+ on a PC) all the time so that I can read small or unclear text more easily. I confirmed the problem, but found the text did zoom just fine in Internet Explorer and Firefox. I brought this to the attention of WordPress last week, they identified it as a problem with the Nikita theme, and today they let me know that it is fixed. I had a nice note from Kathryn, a WordPress “Theme Wrangler” according to her email signature. So, thanks to Laurie at Eye on Environment for letting me know, and to WP for quickly fixing a problem that may have affected a lot of people’s viewing as this theme is quite widely used.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, ISO400, f 2.8, 1/640th top and bottom and 1/500th middle.
burnt embers 
These are great – they DO look like old maps but it takes someone like you with a good eye to notice it.
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Why thank you 🙂
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What amazing landscapes. You captured them beautifully. They are wonderfully reminiscent of looking down from a plane. The bright yellow and black makes for an interesting juxtaposition of landscape and reality.
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There is something remarkably organic about this old paint. I think it is the hand of the weather – transforming the paint into something a lot more like a landscape or the cell structure in a leaf, or any number of other natural formations. It’s fun to find these kinds of things.
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I think that “texture” is the word of the day here! Really interesting study, Ehpem.
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Hi Toad – the texture is very much enhanced by the layers of paint. I think there are three of the yellow each slightly different colours, but it could be only two. The intersections between the layers is particularly interesting.
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These are wonderful. The patterns of cracks are so close to the patterns of leaf veins and cells.
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Thanks Doug – I was thinking that too. I must say that when I was doing this series I was remembering some of your street pavement pattern photographs, like this one: http://www.words4it.com/?p=7498. Not much like what I was doing, but inspirational none-the-less.
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This is turning out to be an excellent series. These are wonderful. I love just color and texture in a nicely composed photo.
I tried to use the enlarge feature in Chrome (on this site) but it works fine now. Who knew?
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Thank you Ken. I am pleased with how it is working out too – I guess I should try some more mini projects from time to time. This one was probably a half hour project, pretty easily fit in.
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What do passers by think when they see you grovelling in the gutter photographing imperfections in curbside paint work?
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I think that passers by are pretty tolerant of eccentric people with cameras pointing at things like this. But, if they think I am pointing at them, they often get all stiff and suspicious, as I do in the same situation.
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