Spring Sketches

The praise of spring has become a consistent literary trend for poets from ancient times to the present. For photographers, however, how to capture the beauty of spring through the lens constitutes a different aesthetic narrative.

Although my place often suffers from dust, there is something pleasing to the eye in this area of several dozen miles. It was a beautiful day, and I arrived here by car as if I were in another world.

Cherry Blossoms

The Japanese love for cherry blossoms runs deep, as evidenced by their literary narratives and critical theories. Cherry blossoms are often in full bloom between February and March of the lunar calendar. Cherry blossoms have small petals and come in white, red and pink. As soon as spring arrives, cherry blossoms start to bloom one after another from the boughs, looking delicate and soft, pure and introverted, as if they were fairies incarnate on earth. However, the flowering period of cherry blossoms is short, single cherry blossoms usually only open to about 4 days to 10 days, they exhausted their full strength, and soon withered.

As with all beautiful things in this world, their short-lived fate is a cause of great sadness. This is not only an emotion, but also an aesthetic interest that is prevalent in the Japanese literary tradition.

Simply put, beautiful things constitute the object of their aesthetic, while sorrow forms the tone of their aesthetic.

When shooting, I needed to find a good camera position and increase the exposure by using the bright sunlight as the light source for the subject. In fact, a bright tone is the best way to express the beauty of cherry blossoms.

Elm money

When I was very young, I could often find one or two elm trees around the house. Usually they weren't very visible, but in the spring they would produce these bunches of furry elm money.

Filming date: March 25, 2021.
Location: Fangshan, Nanjing.