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I'm ending this month pretty much as I began it. Long exposure shots of the line of rocks off the Lincoln-Shields Recreation Area near Alton, Illinois. Here's another from last night. When you return to the same place over and over, it gives you the opportunity to dig into the subtleties that each different evening and, indeed, each minute of those different evenings provide. It's easy to understand why some artists (think Monet and waterlilies) repeat seemingly the same scene. But it's not the same – looking into each is somewhat akin to looking into a Mandlebrot fractal where layers and layers of detail resolve into further layers, endlessly.

I wonder if any mathematician could model the variations I see as I gaze as this turbulent river, even smoothed out with a good long exposure – I suppose technically it could be done, just as digital camera turns sampled photons of light into a digital signal that, transformed, restores that image. But this image is a very crude sampling of the myriad variations my eye beholds. Magnify it just a little and all you will see are pixel blocks. No fractal regeneration here. Somehow, the brain's imagination can bypass this limitation. Look long enough at even this low resolution image, and you seem to recreate as much of the endless variation as you care to let your imagination embrace.

All of which is a very long winded way of saying that the mind's eye is the greatest and most wonderful eye of all.

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