Another Flower Screensaver

I just got home from Eugene, Oregon, where I spent a bit more than a week hanging out with my parents and taking lots of photos of my hometown. Partially the photos were taken for reference, but some of them I took just for the pure artistic pleasure.

One of the most interesting things about taking so many pictures (I filled my 8 gig card and then some) of the place I grew up is that it really gives you the chance to see it with fresh eyes. I lived in Eugene for the first 18 years of my life, and while I knew intellectually that it was a lush, green city, it’s easy to take that for granted when it’s all you know.

Cleveland is actually a fairly green city (no really it is!), but looking at Eugene through a lens really allowed me to realize how unique my first city is in terms of greenery. What really surprised me though wasn’t the trees and moss, and layers of green that grow all over the place. What shocked me was the plenitude of brilliant flowers.

With that in mind, this flower screensaver was a nice treat for me, a little touch of home. The rotating photo screensaver gives six photos of various flowers, some of which I’ve never seen before. The photos are extremely close up, in a few cases so extreme that the images are abstracted and barely seem like flowers at all.

A couple of the photos are bright spiky plants, similar to some of the flowers I came across in Eugene. I’ve never noticed them before, probably because I don’t spend a lot of time looking at flowers, but their shape is unusual and enticing.

This nature screensaver is very different than the other flower screensaver I reviewed last month. While the subject is the same, the use of extreme close-ups completely changes the feel and context of the screensaver. One (the earlier review) is about beautiful scenes of bright colorful nature. This flower screensaver is all about form.

The pace of this screensaver is just right, staying on the image long enough to process it but not long enough to dwell overlong on what are, in several cases, very simple shapes. The balance to that is I’d love to see more photos here. Six photos isn’t stingy when it comes to photo downloadable screensavers, but I’d love to see 10 or 12.

As with all the best nature screensavers, what really works here is the simplicity of the images. This flower screensaver doesn’t try to do anything complicated, it just delivers elegant forms and an even more elegant final effect.