The older I get, the more I appreciate the beauty of simplicity. And I've found, as I'm sure you have, that simplicity is not as simple as it appears.
Creating a photograph with a simple composition and no extraneous elements requires practice, effort and attention to detail. The same holds true for writing. As Mark Twain quipped, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
It’s said that it takes 10 years of study to master the Japanese tea ceremony – the epitome of simplicity and harmony.
Simplicity takes work. But the result is deeply, simply satisfying.
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What a lovely, deeply quiet image... would make a great cover of a book on Zen Koans (the book itself might as well be "empty" :) As you say, images such as these are very hard to find, to capture, and - for some - hard even to appreciate (where is the "Wagnerian-Epic view?"). Oh, it's there, along with so much more. Beautifully done. It reminds me of my dad's final painting (that was still sitting on his easel the day he died over 20 years ago). My dad was a lifelong artist with decades' worth of "complex" landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes. Yet his final image was a beguilingly "simple" watercolor (childlike even, to untrained/unappreciative eyes) of a few colored…