Rocks are great for detail. Or they can be. These lichen covered rocks on Skyline Drive, Virginia have been used in quite a few of my pictures.

The 'original' joiner was getting too big to work with - over 750mb in photoshop - and so I had to make it a half the size to help processing. Jpegs can get too big do work with and start to give error messages and refuse to open past certain sizes. This one here is reduced further. The one below is less than half the original size and gives you an idea of the kind of detail possible in these expanding canvases of joiner photographs.

The kids themselves are so active and it was a cold day anyway. So two of them appear twice, in theatrical poses provided by the accidents of the frozen moment.

While there is obviously a central figure there is still the question of what the picture is about. How do you choose or help the viewer choose what the picture is? It's not as simple as it sounds as I've found I can look at the same photo for years and not see what it is about until some particular day when the penny drops. So what do I think this one is about? Well I think it is about how kids and parents see and feel a place differently. The same woman is repeated twice but is relaxed in both poses. The children are in action, moving and 'in competition' or even in 'combat' with the background. The kids see it as a place to physically experience. The adult sees it as a tone and texture place, to pass your eye over or maybe brush your hand across. It's a wall and there are impervious divisions but we don't quite know what they are. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. Bottom line I punched up texture and selected the photos of the kids that were more like poses, little heroes doing their stuff.

Rocks are great. And if you care you can try to spot where rocks have been copied, repeated and inverted to fill spaces and puzzle the eye at times.