Lens-Artists Challenge #327: Five Elements

This week, Sofia of photographias is hosting the Challenge and her theme for the week is, ‘5 Elements‘. Immediately this gave me pause. Five elements? I thought there were just four. However, I continued to read Sofia’s post: ‘… then I got to the 5 Elements of Wuxing, a Chinese philosophy. [The elements] are slightly different too, with Wood and Metal joining Water, Fire and Earth’. Sofia continued: ‘So, this is the background for this challenge. The elements that create the world around us’. 

Decoding ancient philosophies is not really my cuppa tea, so if you want to know more about Wuxing Sofia’s post will explain further. Instead, I decided to take a more literal approach and stick to representations of the theme.

Wood and Metal were straightforward. Go to any village in the Portuguese countryside and the streets are filled with houses with rusting metal doors, or abandoned buildings with rotting wooden doors or window frames. These are a goldmine for anyone (i.e. me) interested in textures or abstracts and a lunchtime trip to the nearby village of Largo da Feira provided some excellent examples. 

The header image of this post is a wooden door with peeling paint, and another example combined a wooden door with metal nail heads sticking out. I was quite tickled with this mixture of two elements.

Water gave me an excuse for one of my favourite subjects; cabbage leaves. I’m not sure what it is about cabbage leaves but they always produce lovely water droplets, and early the other morning the leaves of the cabbage plants along the side of the road were covered with dew.

Earth was surprisingly difficult, though, and I’m not sure if I’m really happy with this example, there’s certainly no artistic merit to this image and for me it’s a bit … bland. It’s a close up of a colony of moss or lichen on the top of a small pillar of earth. Around the moss the earth has been eroded away by successive years of rainfall leaving these odd little pillars behind. Eventually they will topple over and be lost, not that anyone will ever notice as they pass by on their way to and from the railway station. 

Admittedly, Fire was the element that I had the most fun with. Right from the start I wanted to make a trichrome of Fire, just to see how it would come out, and our pellet-burning fire was the perfect subject. My first attempt,  with my little noughties digicam in Program mode, was a bit of a disaster, but when I used the camera in Manual mode it was much better. Hope that you like this tamed fire.

So these are my elements. I’d been waiting for the weather to turn so that I can get out and make a trichrome of moving clouds for the Air element, before I remembered that Air was not one of the elements of Wuxing, but here’s an example of what I had in mind.

Thank you to Sofia for suggesting this subject, it’s been a challenge, in more ways than one. Next week John will be setting the theme, so I hope you will join in. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

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