This week’s challenge focuses on Chinese compositional theory. Amy, in describing the challenge, notes that the theory has influenced Chinese medicine and philosophy for thousands of years.  In her challenge post, she writes, “This week you have an opportunity to interpret metal, wood, water, fire, and/or earth with your favorite photos to express ‘…the only home we’ve ever known’.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

In the opening photo, my challenge response starts with ‘Earth’. I spend a  lot of time in the mountains around Phoenix. That photograph features a mountain view at sunset was captured on South Mountain at the Dobbins Viewpoint.

According to the USGS, about 71 percent of the earth is covered with water. While humans can’t live natively in that domain, some have developed skills and equipment that allow them to survive in the environment for at least a small amount of time.

Humans have made natural elements work for them for centuries. Early attempts at working with metallic elements were crude, but with time, clever individuals have developed processes for working and shaping metals into an infinite variety of tools that serve mankind or stimulate an artistic sense. The above photo is clearly the former, a large grain dryer used to prepare harvested grain for long term storage. The highly reflective surface takes on the color of the sky at this angle.

The next element in my submission is wood. In its natural form in trees, wood has its own special beauty, but with the advent of metal tools, wood can be easily shaped and finished into all kinds of practical and artistic purposes. Wood is easily recycled as in the example above where wagon wheels were repurposed to be the decorative backs of wooden benches that line the sidewalk in front of a store in Old Town Scottsdale, Arizona.

Fire is useful in so many ways. One of the earliest ways of working with metal involved heating it, sometimes to the point of melting the metal allowing it to be formed or shaped into any number of useful objects. In the image above, a blacksmith works a red hot piece of steel heated until it glowed by the fire in the charcoal pit behind him.

Thanks again to Amy for an interesting challenge. In most browsers, you can click on any of the images above for a better view. I hope you enjoyed my selection of images and I am looking forward to next week’s challenge!

John Steiner