Benjamin Chan

Mountain View Cemetery is one of my favorite places in Oakland.  You’d think: you’re morbid, a cemetery?  But seriously, it’s a really cool place.  It’s a mix of death, life, beauty, rich people in fancy graves, poor people in simple graves, flowers, gravestones, grass and trees.  All that you could leave behind, and none that you can take with you.

It was designed to invoke a sense of man in his natural setting.  Thus, the cemetery is more of a park then of a death bed.  A place where a soul, in some ways, comes to rest.  It’s really romantic, not in the I’ll-buy-you-flowers sense, but more of an emotional way to connect man, life, and death.  An idealized sense that humans, at the end of their time, come to connect back in peace with the earth.

(more after the jump…)

KJ and I went to take pictures, and here are some of the noteables.  In general, going on photowalks has been a really good way for me to engage with the environment I live in.  For example, in my neighborhood, it’s really grimy and kind of boring and dirty, but it’s been a good exercise for me to really find beauty in my living area.  At the cemetery there’s always a strange sense of paradoxes:  Life and death, rich and poor, beauty and ugliness.  This time around, there were all of these beautiful flowers, planted for the sake of tradition.  The made great subjects to focus on.    And if you want to see more, you can check out the rest of the set on my Flickr.

Here are some notable shots:

Multicolor tulips.  The light was overcast, and slightly rainy, which made for really great color and even light.  I was really lucky that day.

These hanging flowers were really delightful to my eyes.  I think it’s the combination of the pattern of shapes from the flowers, and then flowing downward shape of the plants.

It was interesting to take pictures of the leaves that were dying off.

I was really intrigued by the shape of the tulips.  Nature has a way of expressing a sense organic perfection.

I cranked up the ISO ( film speed) on my camera, so I could shoot at a higher speed.  I think these pictures of the water fountain really express this sense of the camera as a machine that catches moments.

Again, the patterns and shapes were interesting from all angles.  There’s a lot of color contrast going on here, too.

KJ in action.

Check out the 6 black hands reaching out of the stamen.  Creepy!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.