The Art of Season Cycle | Part 2: Spring

For my Season Cycle project, an ongoing project to write an EP for each season, every track has a distinct track artwork using photographs from my collection. In this blog series, I’m going to showcase the art and talk about how I captured the images. Feel free to listen along while you read!
(I’ve written a similar post about the art of Season Cycle: Winter. Click/tap here to read it!)

The Cover Art

I took this photo ~15 years ago and have been waiting for the right moment to use it for a project. I used a "reverse lens" macro technique, where you literally hold the lens onto the camera backwards. You have to focus by moving the entire camera closer to your subject, and since it acts like binoculars, the zoom is SUPER close and the depth of field is very narrow. It's very difficult to focus, but thankfully with digital cameras, you can try as many times as necessary to get the shot.

Vernal Equinox

I’m not very good at it, but I really enjoy bokeh photography (photography that emphasizes the blurred, out of focus portions of an image). I don’t recall if this photo was taken intentionally or by accident, but it felt like the perfect image to accompany the song—soft light and blurred shades of green that allude to the unfolding spring season.

Ephemerality

Spring is truly a season of impermanence—flower blooms can appear and vanish in a matter of hours, bare branches transition from small buds to full leaves in days, and birds create intricate, temporary nests that slowly disintegrate after their babies have flown away. A couple of years ago, a robin built one such nest in a tree right next to our front door. I was fascinated by its development and thoroughly documented the process in photos. The color of these eggs is breathtaking!

Bonus pic of four baby robins somehow managing to remain in the nest without falling out.

In Full Bloom

There’s a flower farm near us where you can wander the fields and cut your own bouquets—this was part of a lovely arrangement that my wife assembled a couple years ago. Flower enthusiasts will cry foul on this one, as all of these flowers are late summer blooms—I have plenty of photos of spring flowers, but I just loved the textures and colors of these! Sorry they’re not spring blooms!

Dawn Chorus

I have nine million photos of clouds at sunrise and sunset. I never get tired of seeing the vibrant reds/oranges/pinks as the light hits those high altitude clouds. The song Dawn Chorus is meant to evoke the pre-dawn birdsong of a spring morning, so I selected a photo that matches the experience of standing outside and listening to nature’s music as the sun comes up.

Green, Green, Green!

The thing I love the most about the spring is the transition from winter’s drab grays and browns to vibrant greens (greens, greens)! What better image to convey that than a close-up of a leaf? There’s so much beauty in those fractal veins (Fractal Veins…adding that to my list of future song titles).

Infinite Expansion

Truly the hallmark of the spring season is the explosion of new life. I’ve mentioned it many times already, but everywhere you look, something is growing, expanding, reproducing—our planet’s endless cycle of growth on full display. The image I chose here is of thousands of small plants covering the surface of a bog. From a distance, they’re an unbroken carpet of green, but up close, they reveal themselves to be a multitude of individual leaves, just one example of spring’s boundless growth.

And that gets us through the final track of Season Cycle: Spring. If you purchase and download a copy of the EP, there is a digital booklet with some additional photography not mentioned here—just in case you like what you see here and want to see more!

Thanks for reading, listening, and supporting my art! Believe it or not, Summer is just around the corner…Season Cycle: Summer will arrive in just a few weeks. Watch this space!