Guys of a certain age will immediately understand the title of this post. In-A-Gadda_Da_Vida was a song by Iron Butterfly and was supposedly the first real “heavy metal” song. The song’s real title was supposed to be “In The Garden Of Eden” but the singer, Doug Ingle, was mighty drunk  on cheap red wine when he was recording and the words slurred out as “In A Gadda Da Vida”. To the rest of the band it sounded mysterious and sort of eastern philosophy, Hinduish, which was a big thing in the 60’s. They decided to title it the way it sounded, In-A-Gadda_Da_Vida. The 17 minute song takes up an entire side of an LP.  It went “Gold” quickly.

Thank you for indulging me with the telling of that little 60’s tidbit. With the publication of FOS #2 and with FOS #3 already in the works (images all shot and created), I decided to embark on some new shooting and quickly fell into two grooves. The first was shooting scenes reflected in car windows. Not sure if this is going to go anywhere but you won’t know what is at the end of the road without actually walking to the end of the road.

The second groove was photographing closeups of trees and “nature” with an eye of putting forth a view of a different world. The Garden of Eden is a mythical place obviously (at least to me) and so I wanted to depict it as swirling uncertainty with natural forms poking out of this haze of unknown. It is still at the very, very nascent stage where I am just shooting to see what it might look like and still don’t know  if it will be color or monochrome or a certain mix of both. The haze I think also represents how people create a reality out of nothing, the Garden Of Eden, Hell, Heaven, they are all very much just places of the mind.

Okay, gots to keep on walking the road.