Mary Bedy Photography

I’m drawn to natural patterns, like most other people. When you choose wood for a piece of furniture or flooring, or any other application, you pick the wood grain with the pattern that you most respond to. It’s the same thing with granite slabs for your kitchen counters. The pattern and color that you enjoy the most is what you will choose. But natural patterns and textures extend to so much more, like fuzzy patterned fungi growing on a tree stump, rugged tree bark, ice bubbles in a pond in winter, a snow laden tree. Nature is the ultimate painter and sculptor. She brings things into existence and makes them grow in patterns, she freezes them according to the laws of physics of crystal structures, and she paints them interesting colors. She surrounds us with so much beauty, it’s hard to see it all. The colorful arrangement of the feathers on a duck, the camouflage of various insects and animals, the beautiful bright fish in the ocean, and the waves of sand molde

There are two kinds of photographs I love — very complex photos and very minimal photos. I also like everything in between, but I love very complex and very simple. Looking at a tangle of branches, vines, plants, or enjoying the complex moving patterns of sun on water are two examples of complex. You will notice with my photograph of snowy branches, your eyes move around and take in the entire image as a cohesive whole. The point here is the pattern, not necessarily the subject itself. There is no one element fighting for dominance. The spaces not occupied by a branch or a tree trunk are pretty uniform in size and evenly spaced throughout the entire image. On the complete opposite end of the scale, we have the image where, indeed, the main subject is immediately very obvious and it’s the unused blank areas (the negative space), that lend emphasis to the subject itself because the subject is what you immediately see. As in my image of thorns in snow, your eyes follow the subject f