.Mused--PhotoBlogs Take a Step Up

Most of the photo-blogs I've seen have been little more than glorified family albums. There's nothing wrong with that, but photography is more than just a memory-saver. Years ago, when I had a little money for a while, I took pictures as a hobby and discovered how difficult it was to get what you were looking for: the right composition, the right colorization, the right texture, the right light. It was relatively easy to succeed at one or the other, a little harder to get a two or three combo going, but practically impossible to capture it all. Great photographers seem to do this routinely, but for the rest of us it's a struggle that can take years to develop (no pun intended).

I did grow to love photography and appreciate the people who can take great pictures, however rare. Photoblogs has lots of good ones on its list, but one in particular caught my eye because unlike most of the others, it seems to be dedicated to art photos alone.

.Mused (that's (dot) Mused) is an elegant blend of beautifully rendered photographs that have absolutely nothing in common except their perfection. A B&W of a musician--

--lives next door to a color-symphony of a laboratory.

Photoblogger 'pixelflake' isn't interested in photo-essays or documenting places and/or people; s/he's only interested in great pictures and can apparently produce them effortlessly--at least s/he makes it look effortless. From the almost startling abstraction of an alley--

--to the true abstraction of reflected light--

--to the amusing if unintended juxtaposition of colliding messages--

--to the deceptively simple color-study of a palm tree framed against a blue sky--

--the only thing these images have in common is pixelflake's extraordinary eye for the telling detail, the accidental complimentation of form with texture, the sudden surprise of a graceful line where you'd least expect it. S/he seems particularly drawn to abstract lines, as here--

--and to incomplete, naked forms, as in the picture of reflected light above. S/he doesn't try to impose form on them--s/he's more courageous than that; s/he revels in them as they are, for what they are, and in the process draws from them an unexpected strength and the meaning at the core of each.

I spent more than an hour surfing .Mused and found only one shot I thought didn't work--an astonishing success rate, to me, because I'm usually really quirky when it comes to photos--I nit-pick them to death: this should have been cropped, that should have been framed differently, the other one should have been in color instead of b&w (or vice versa). But surfing pixelflake's photographs engendered almost none of that. I could flip from picture-to-picture, lingering on many (I find the picture of the guitar player haunting on a lot of different levels), without that nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right, that there was something either I was missing or the photographer had missed.

'pixelflake' missed zip. Do yourself a favor--if you like photography, don't miss .Mused.