Coincidences

I believe in them, by the way.

Anyways, I have begun playing around a little with composing photographs for use on our church's bulletin cover. There were a number of requests for my first cover, so I placed it on the church's web site in multiple sizes so that people could use it for a desktop background image. This is the image that appears to the left. All the the pictures on it are free stock photos from stock.xchng, composed using Photoshop. Easy enough.

About a week later, I discovered a photo I took 2 years ago on vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and wanted to use it, unchanged, as a cover photo for the bulletin. So today, I dutifully opened it, added a scripture reference and a couple of subtle effects, and uploaded it in all of the necessary resolutions to the church's site. This is the one to the right of the post. After I was all done, I noticed something: the two shots are of nearly identical rivers. Oh, the trees are different species, and the one has shallower water, but the general shape of the treeline, and the bend in the river, and the angle from which they were shot, are incredibly similar. I'm sure there is a principle of design and composition in there somewhere, and it is probably related to the golden ratio as I used to teach my students, but I haven't taken the time yet to figure out what it might be.

But I find it kinda funny, and kinda weird that my first two forays into this process start with such similar photos. What deep need in me is met by this image of a river running through a forest? Is there some Freudian or Jungian meaning? Perhaps it is nothing so deep at all; maybe my design skills are so limited that I can only work with this particular theme.

Either way, I found it intriguing.