Blue Days
We will have snow soon. If it stays as cold as the past month has been, we'll get flakes when the next moist system passes through. Until then, we get hard, clinging frosts almost every morning. Frosts confers some of the same aesthetic benefits (and challenges) as snow, photographically speaking, without the travel woes or the need to find the snow shovel somewhere over in the barn.
I'm remembering how the big, orange snow plows come down our white-cloaked valley the day after a big snow, pushing it out of the road into chest-high blocks and mounds at the margins of the frozen road. It was there in those jumbled ice cakes I first saw the light coming from the shadowed crevices: the blue-green light of water and atmosphere passing through a lens of snow. This was my first experience of what arctic travelers refer to as "blue ice."
Summer forest: deal with the excess of green light passing through and reflected off of a lens of foliage overhead. Winter fields: keep the snow white, since this is how our eye interprets it, without distorting what other colors remain in bare tree trunks, lichen-covered cliffs and the green-black rhododendrons.
But for now, we have frosts that make the finest filigree of every twig and branch in that short interval between the rising of the sun over the east ridge and the sun's insipid heat that is sufficient to melt it all away.
Wife and son here, coming back from their second trip around the pasture, having left the slow-walking guy with the camera immersed in the fine details of watching the sun come up on a frosty morn.
Comments
All your photos, Fred, are beautiful, but when this loaded into my browser this morning - as I sit here, just me and the cat on a cold, winter morning - an audible gasp escaped me - "Oh my god."
This is extraordinary and what a fantastic image to have in my mind today.
Posted by: Ronni Bennett | December 28, 2004 7:54 AM
Thanks, Ronni. Yes, this is a keeper: my wandering son, home, briefly from Vancouver, and his mother walking side by side in such immense beauty, in a light that will never fall just this way again.
Life is sweet. Mostly.
Posted by: fred1st | December 28, 2004 8:00 AM
Fred
I can always count on your pictures to make me gasp as I see the beauty were are given.
Thanks for sharing them with us.
Take Care
Michael
Posted by: Michael | December 28, 2004 9:01 AM
Is Nathan still there? How long? Check out my livejournal today. I'd like to hear what you think.
Posted by: trish | December 28, 2004 10:44 AM
I love this picture, too. You have an artist's eye for composition. NJ
Posted by: NJ | December 28, 2004 11:48 AM
...oh my gosh fred...you are WONDERFUL reading! thanks and happy holidays to you.
Posted by: Anne | December 28, 2004 12:15 PM
Yes, Fred, I agree. What an absolutely gorgeous image! I love the perspective on it as much as I love the color. Wow! You know, that would make a great poster, taken into Photoshop, and adding some kind of quote to go along with it.
I've taken black and white photography last semester and will be doing more digital work this semester. If only I could achieve some semblance of the mastery with a camera that you display!
annie
Posted by: annie | December 28, 2004 12:40 PM
What a picture, Fred! Merry Christmas.
Posted by: beth | December 28, 2004 1:33 PM
Another great photo, Fred.
Posted by: K. | December 28, 2004 2:01 PM
Beautiful photo............Oh how I wish I could be back in New England as they just got a terrific snowstorm!!! Except for one brief snow in December, which was gone before you could blink an eye, we haven't had any snow in St. Louis ......yet.......
Posted by: Dottie | December 28, 2004 4:16 PM
Beautiful shot, Fred.
Posted by: David St Lawrence | December 31, 2004 4:43 PM