Greetings, Earthlings...

Welcome to Beyond the Limits of Reason, the meeting point for all things Michael Doubrava.

Michael Doubrava profile

I was born on Earth during the second half of the twentieth century.

Untitled (San Lorenzo, New Mexico)

Untitled (San Lorenzo, New Mexico)
A metaphor for the conflict between rationality and emotion; betweeen Apollo and Dionysus; between the empirical and the supernatural; between stasis and revolution...

our motto and mission is to

tickle the idiot
rapture the faithful
pity all the ignorant and hateful

illuminate the enlightened
confound the intellectual
with life distilled flood memory's temple
Showing posts with label orchid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orchid. Show all posts

September 9, 2025

September 2025 : work in process



This image originated as an in-camera double-exposure, that I immediately cropped, duplicated, horizontally rotated, and then paired flush to the original.

August 17, 2025

Exploding Flowers of the Kansas Prairie

This quadruple-exposure was created in-camera using a swing/tilt flat-field 80mm lens on a full-frame dslr. Handheld, using on-camera flash.


 

 

May 7, 2025

April 21, 2024

New Work (April 2024)



 This image began as a triple-exposure, which was then duplicated four times and arranged to complete the final work. 

February 23, 2021

Three Different Visual Strategies/Responses to the Same Subject: Orchid

These three photographs were made using the same camera, in the same room, utilizing the same subject: my very patient and always willing subject, the plant I lovingly have named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who rose from the dead. Lazarus the Orchid came into my life  three or four years ago. This orchid has returned from what I believed was death, to bloom and flower again, over and over. This re-flowering, this rebirth, always inspires me to observe and celebrate and create a new round of photographs.

The top image is the most visually conventional, on the surface, yet even it is a couple of steps away from a traditional photograph: looking closely, the viewer detects ghostly double images within the frame.

The second image was made with a pinhole "lens", rather than an actual glass lens. The long exposure time, thirty seconds (due to the tiny f162 aperture through which light strikes the sensor), resulted in a bit of softening of the floral detail.

The third and final image is also a pinhole photograph; it varies from the second image due to a sense of overall Dionysian energy and fecundity, almost from a bug's-eye perspective.

 



 

January 27, 2021

January 2021




 My thought when I first viewed this in-camera, triple-exposure photograph, as it appeared on the viewing screen on the back of my DSLR, was that extremely weird, uncanny sensation that I was gazing at a figure simultaneously orchid and human.

Looking for more?

You can access more imagery by clicking on the phrase above which says"older posts". Many additional works can be viewed dating back to the earliest posts which initiated this blog.