Author Archives: damienpitter

Fallen

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Yokohama, Japan. April 2012.

Japanese roses, also called Camelias, grow along the edge of the foreigners’ cemetery in Yokohama. I don’t understand the patterns of their blooming, only that it happens a couple of times a year. One of these times coincides roughly with the blooming of the cherry trees. Someone told me that the time in which the sakura are most beautiful is not the moment of full bloom (though admittedly that’s pretty spectacular), but the moment just after, as the blossoms are beginning to fade and fall from the trees like snow. When I was walking home from school one day, I happened to look down along the cemetery road and saw these fallen camelias and wind-blown sakura petals, perfect in their imperfection.

Big Skies, Part II

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Banff, Alberta, Canada. July 2012.



Usually when I am in a car, I’m driving, so it’s a great pleasure when I’m on a trip, short or long, and someone else is behind the wheel. That’s when I get to be behind the camera. These shots were taken on the return journey from Calgary to Banff (with my brother driving and my nephew in the back seat giggling like a fiend in the wind every time I rolled the window down to shoot). Really big fields of canola always seem slightly surreal to me, a color too rich and too bright to be real under dotted skies that stretch out forever.
We had the opportunity last summer, to stay in a little red cottage on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. I was pretty exhausted from the school year’s work, so I was more than content to just sit on the deck and stare at the sea. And I found it totally mesmerizing. How subtle shifts in the clouds changed the way the light hit the ocean, the way the weather moves like a room full of ballroom dancers, all moving together and yet somehow each part doing its own unique thing. My favorite of these is the one with the ship in it (in the bottom left-hand corner), so small and charging ahead into all that grey. It might be worth mentioning, too, that these shots are not in black & white. These are the greys of Newfoundland in all their glorious color.