looduskalender.ee

 

The quietly upwards-rising flood water detaches mussels with open shell halves and the cases of dead sea urchins, that however soon get filled with water and sink to the bottom. The water sets nutrients and small fish moving, then large fish, and after them terns and gulls and fishermen.

 

The ebb leaves mussels, sea urchin shells, dead crabs, barnacles and starfish lying about, pulls off the water veil from rock surfaces and seaweed masses. Snails and molluscs and barnacles shut themselves into their cases and stay waiting for the return of the water. The shore crabs rustle beneath the protective seaweed cover. Gulls and terns trip around on the wet mud, checking the day’s specials. The photographer gets close to rocks, whose surface looks like a universe in itself.

 

 

I don’t consciously think of it, but the eye constantly looks for it – regularity and structure in nature.

 

But it is with patterns in nature as with life itself: structure and order is not permanent, everything around you disappears, changes and becomes something else.

 

You might believe that you will go back later to photograph but on returning you will not find what you saw initially. Interesting plants have withered or been eaten, the old picturesque boathouse has fallen down or gotten a panelling of impregnated wood; the multicoloured lichens have lost their colours and into the interestingly convoluted rock  surface a hole has been drilled for a cattle fence. All changes have their causes and they are not always tied to the amount of precipitation and temperature..

 

If there is an interesting pattern on the rocks, sands or a tree trunk it must be visited repeatedly before the light is right. Sometimes the right moment must be waited for until tedium and it might even not arrive.

 

Sometimes however it happens that you go out and the greater part of the day provides perfect light for photographing nature’s patterns. The ebbing sea has arranged green algae in bundles in a pattern. It hasn’t happened in three years but in the fourth I get my photo.

 

So – no preconceived notions, no fixed expectations, only an open mind and a camera with a charged battery along.

 

 

Ingrid Maasik’s exhibition in the main building of Lihula Manor is open until Nobvember 30th 2014.

The authors photos can be seen at: LINK