plant abstracts (and more) from the Lincoln Park Conservatory

A visitor to the Lincoln Park Conservatory was reading a book by a small pond, occasionally talking to the maintenance guys whom she was obviously friendly with. I don't know how she survives the heat and moisture in her thick jacket...

Winter tends to be a quiet season for me as a photographer. Trees have shedded leaves months ago and it is too early for the spring budding. The sky is often gray, reflecting the gray dryness of our neighbor's front lawn. There aren't too many parades and fairs to go out for portraits. My camera and I mostly hybernate during winter, unless there's a spectacular snow storm or something of the sort.

This year, this natural (?) tendency has been backed by another factor: I was too busy with the preparation for my first photo show to do anything other than buying frames, cutting mat boards and peeling photo corners off their backing sheets. (And when these were done, there was the exciting part of running up and down three flights of stairs with cardboard boxes full of framed photographs.) When the show was done, I was exhausted--I wanted to do things with absolutely no connection to photography. Patrick, who also participated in the same show, felt the same way. So, we spent the first weekend after the show buying grocery to fill up our empty fridge and watching an anime show set in post-unification Germany.

The next weekend after that, however, the photoworm in my stomach started to squirm. I wanted to take pictures. Badly. We went to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, one of our favorite photo-shooting spot (it's free and full of interesting tropical plants). Here are some of the shots from the outing.


Making a near-abstract image out of natural objects is one of my favorite experiment.


Two different patterns on the stalk (?) fascinated me--what are they becoming when they grow up?


A palm leaf seen from below. It has a nice curve like a woman's back!


My recent obsession: keeping the image very dark to direct attention to minimally lit parts of interest.


keywords: Chicago, Lincoln Park Conservatory, greenhouse, plant, photography, photograph, abstract, portrait, natural abstraction