Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, and if your mind is receptive to it, you can easily find beauty in the natural shapes and colors all around you.
I find beauty in the pure and simple natural surroundings and objects that I encounter on the beach, here on the southernmost shores of Africa.
Take for example this rare find. It's a piece of spongy sea creature or plant that seems to have washed ashore. It's a rare discovery which I hardly ever see but here it is today. The color is so rare and beautiful, perhaps my favorite color.
Not only is it attractive but it's also very fleeting. Within hours of capturing this beautiful shade of saffron or gold, the color on the sponge fades to a dull beige. This beautiful color is now only visible in this photo, as the real thing now remains but a dim reflection of its former self.
In contrast, look at the beautiful cobalt color of this sea urchin that usually lives under the water. Today the tide is low and has revealed this seldom seen sea creature with its truly impressive shade of blue. And since it's usually hidden, this beautiful creature is hardly ever noticeable.
I just happen to be at the right place at the right time to stumble across this natural beauty which is on display for a few minutes as the sea recedes under the pull of the moon's gravity. If you weren't in the right receptive frame of mind, you might simply walk right past and overlook this fine detail of stunning blue sea urchin among all the other blander shades of nature. So the eye of the beholder is a important and the beauty lying all about for us to observe and admire.
Something else I seldom encounter is this massive root bulb from the indigenous plant life which acts as dune cover here on the long stretch of soft white sand on this pristine stretch of beach. These have only been exposed now because of the recent massive storm which caused the waves to wash away large swathes of fine dune sand and thus expose the normally buried roots.
It's only now that I see these curious root bulbs and thus one is really big. It's the biggest of all the ones if found while exploring this shoreline after the historic storm of recent days. That's why I love to capture these photographic images for the record because these findings are actually quite rare, based on my almost 20 years of exploring this particular stretch of shoreline.
And sometimes it's the rocks that appear more beautiful than usual, even though they're the same rocks as always. However, it's the lighting and moisture that varies from day to day, along with the tide, all of which creates ever new shades and angles to capture through the lens and the eye of the beholder.
Sometimes it's just the light that is just right to create a stunning visual impression. A regular daily scene can become transformed into a powerful display of beauty simply by having the right cloud and sun angle, as any Annie of clouds will agree. It's all in the light, something the Impressionist painters of the late nineteenth century discovered and captured in their European landscapes.
The mood is completely transformed by the atmospheric conditions on the beach from one day to the next. The same scene can appear happy or moody, from a subjective point of view, simply by the shift in the lighting. And this makes it worthwhile capturing in photo, while it lasts.
Photos my own. Written and published via my mobile device onto the Hive blockchain from the beach.