Heere's Phoebe!

It seemed only fair, given my successful senior pictures photoshoot with the Thin White Duke, to give my Eternal Flame a chance at digital immortality. The trick was finding a sunny afternoon during her winter break--more difficult than it should have been, but that's this winter for you. Cold and wet and snowy and anything but comfortable. On the morning of March 22, I watched thick clouds ever so slowly break up, and gave Phoebe, who was busy with homework, a heads up that we could get lucky in the afternoon. A broken sky gave way to blue, and we mobilized, jumping in the car and speeding to my favorite place for afternoon light, rolling hills and decrepit buildings. We brought an array of outerwear but no hairbrush--she says her hair looks better when she doesn't brush it. Must be genetic; my only hairbrush is my fingers.

 

I'd been looking forward to this ever since shooting Liam. I love photography, but more than that I love helping someone appreciate and truly feel their own beauty. "These won't be good. I don't look good today," Phoebe warned. Oh. I hadn't noticed that she didn't look good today. And I'm pretty observant. "Let me show you not looking good," I answered, cackling. "You've got youth, estrogen and an ectomorphic body type on your side, hon. If what I'm seeing through the lens is 'not looking good,' I'd love to not look that good."

I've said it before: shooting people is a lot like shooting wild creatures. The longer your lens, the better you're going to do. Nobody likes to have a camera stuck right in their face! The other great thing about a telephoto lens is that it automatically has a relatively shallow depth of field, so you get this beautiful blurred-out background, focusing on the subject. Oh, how the sky picks up her blue eyes. Red hair and blue eyes is the rarest combination.

 

All through high school, I tried to get my daughter to wear denim, without success. As I think on it, denim was what everyone else she knew was wearing, so she steered clear. I forced one of my 18 denim shirts on her when she left for college. "Trust me on this. Denim goes with everything, and it looks fabulous on everybody. But it'll look even better on you. " Imagine my delight when she turned up for the shoot in that same shirt. It works with weathered barnwood, blue eyes and red hair, that's for certain.

 

A stray shaft of sunlight tricked out her hair in the shot above. We went inside the barn to see what we could do there. Oh my! Shadows from a leafing honeysuckle vine fell on her face. Her hair was on fire. The light gave a lushness to her features I hadn't seen before--the slight cleft of her chin! Rembrandt light.

  

I love these Phantom of the Opera shots. There was so much more we could have done, but the Golden Hour was fast fading away.  

  

 

 Let's try a shot through the mullions. Uh-oh!

 

It's the Creeper! We had to have the Creeper shot. I think Phoebe's scarier than Liam! Things like this, I think, have to happen so you can get images like these next ones. 

We moved out to catch the last of the sun's rays. The siding was a beautiful black, and there was just enough sun to light her cheeks. She was totally relaxed and we were getting some really good stuff.

Never oblivious to what's going on around her, she watched and listened to the birds all around. A crow landed briefly in a nearby pine and just as quickly reversed course when it realized there were humans below. "Is that a crow?" she asked, suddenly alert, laser-focused and crouching. It was such a Zick moment I felt I was seeing myself as a 21-year-old.

Such rich textures, between the barnwood and the brambles and that glorious hair. I don't know how one person gets so lucky on the colorful genetic Wheel of Fortune. Both my kids have been lucky.

 Back to posing. "Mess with your hair. Put it up."

Ahhh. Good.

 

I decided to try the black doorway once again, the one that had bamboozled me with Liam.  Two professional photographer friends had suggested exposing on the barnwood as a neutral gray, instead of on Phoebe's face. It worked! I got velvet black and true skin tones. Now I want to take Liam back and try again.

I love the peace in her face here.

 

 Chasing the last red rays of sun, we found them slamming against some red leaves. We'd been practicing the sudden turn that whips her hair into a wildfire.

 

 

 

 Time for jumpshots! We were happy we got such beautiful photos, and I was happy that Somebody wasn't thinking she "didn't look good today" any more. 

Launch it, Red Rocket!

 

 

 

 

 

Some say youth is wasted on the young. Not these young.

With such a graceful and willing subject, it was hard to turn the camera over to Phoebe, but I wanted a photo of myself with the Toothless Lady before she falls down.

I kind of melt right into that old barn. But my teeth are better.

 

We were heavy into shooting when a red pickup came barreling up the never-traveled road. I knew who it was, and was surprised at the speed at which she was driving. She skidded to a halt as I hurried to get my car out of the way. A relieved smile spread across her face. At a distance, she'd taken my camera for a gun and was hell-bent on chasing me out of there. We both laughed.

"Now I know who you are and what you're doing. Thought that was a gun!"

"Well, that's our adrenaline rush for the day!" I answered, and with that, what little light was left fled.

 

 

Thus ended our most excellent Senior in College Photo Shoot. Both kids now, thoroughly documented.  And a couple old ladies, too.

There's something about the juxtaposition of this slender flame, balancing on the brink of her whole life, and that deliquescing barn, waiting for the derecho that will bring her down, that brings a lump to my throat. Time never stops. People keep moving. Buildings left untended fall down. All we can do is love them while they're here.

One Day in Light

March is slapping us around here in Ohio.  Hey! Spring's here!! Whoops! Snow! Here are the Three Graces at noon today, on my way into town. I wanted to document their buds and flowers coming out so early in March, even though the light was flat and dull.

And here they are at 5:46 pm. Same day. Same place. Somewhat different light. If you don't think that light changes everything, that light is life and love, that light is everything, well, it is. At least it is for me. I raced home to catch this scene, praying under my breath that the light wouldn't leave before I could get to this exact place. This place I've shot dozens of times, this place that is never the same twice.

 

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? I don't know. I'm just so grateful that it does.  How lucky can you get, to live on a planet that has skies like this? 

 Before that could happen, though, this had to happen. I went into the store and the sun was out, and the clouds were racing across a cold blue sky. I came out with a full cart and it was blowing a gale, a total horizontal snow whiteout. In the time it took me to unload the cart, my hair, which had been having a pretty good day, was plastered to my skull and dripping. My coat was white with wet snow. I was laughing helplessly because I had no hat, no gloves, and way too little coat.  March, you got me.

 

By the time I got to Fifth Street, the squall was already ending. I could see a sky-blue petticoat under the flannel. This is our beautiful Washington County Library, built on a sacred Native mound. It's a Carnegie library, which means it was built with a $30,000 grant from the Carnegie foundation given January 2, 1913. My father was seven months old, smiling and crowing in his crib. 

In Ohio, 104 public libraries were built from 79 grants (totaling $2,846,484) awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1899 to 1915. In addition, academic libraries were built at 7 institutions (totaling $368,445). 

 I'm awfully glad to have a Carnegie library in our town. Grateful to see my tax dollars at work here, continuing the legacy Carnegie started.

 Glad it's still a library, glad it's got books (and computers) and wonderful staff and they hold public programs. The Washington County Public Library, the Ohio River Museum and Campus Martius Museum will host me March 29, telling the story of that unlucky/lucky West Virginia snowy owl in narration and photos. There isn't a room big enough in the library proper to house it, so we're holding it at 7 PM at Campus Martius Museum, Second and Washington Streets in Marietta.  I can't wait! More info here.

Just a few more shots from today, because they're too beautiful not to post. 

 

The Shadow Barn, from another perspective. When I think of all the times I trotted past here with my little familiar, trying to get a shot of both our shadows, I get a little choked up. I remember the foggy morning we saw a whole family of raccoons cross the road here. They reminded me of nothing so much as coatis. I held onto him and we let them pass. I can still feel him trembling, hear him clearing his throat and just barely whining. I can smell his damp ruff.

 

I love the color combo of asbestos shingles and weathered red wood. I love this little machine shed so much.  It looks like something you'd find out on the North Dakota prairie, only it's rotting faster in Ohio.

 

 The sky was just ridiculous. The shed had a spotlight on it, like someone was expecting it to dance.

Click on this one. Click on all of them, please.

 I got out of the car to grab the mail, and almost fell to my knees. For all the days when the gray flannel reigns, for the weeks on end when the sun barely makes an appearance, there will be an hour of golden glory, and it is enough. It's enough.

On a Late Winter Day

 Shila and I had been planning to get out for a hike one mid- February afternoon, but it was so gray and dreary that we slogged away at cleaning our respective houses instead.  Hours after we'd decided to scratch the hike, I saw a broken sky coming and called her. "We've got a broken sky. Not much light left. Let's just get out and drive around and look at clouds, cover maximum territory."

She was up for that! She raced up from town and we piled into my Subaru with Chetty. We sought out several dirt roads that I'd been driving by for a couple of decades and had always wondered about. I wanted to find out how they all connected. 

The first one we took led to a fabulous dairy farm. I have since learned from helpful Facebook friends that the white bags that I had surmised might contain spare rainclouds, saved for a dry summer day, actually have silage or haylage inside, fermenting away for the cattle to eat. I prefer to think of them as cloud storage, so I will.

 Instead of fretting that they were spoiling my photos, I decided to love the giant white plastic bags. They sure looked cool in this panorama. Please click on it to embiggen.

Shila and Chet and I lingered as long as we could in a small German churchyard, where the stones were all auf Deutsch. 

The clouds stuck together, the wind turned sharp and the temperature plummeted. We had barely worn enough clothes. I love these hands and the fonts on this stone. Also, this is a classic Chet Baker photobomb. Does he see dead people? 

 The font and the image on this monument get me.  GATES AJAR GONE HOME. They remind me of my new friend Bobby Rosenstock's amazing work at Just A Jar Design Press here in Marietta.

We fled from the biting wind and gloomy skies of the German cemetery, turning onto a very strange road, knowing not where we'd end up. As I drove, the terrain began to look familiar. "I think I know where I am!" I said.  Sugar Run...the name was so familiar, I'd seen it before, so I knew it would come out on a road I drive. Sure enough, we came out at a bizarre backwater of trailers, shanties and outbuildings where, as far as I can tell, large numbers of junked cars are generated to be spread for miles through the surrounding countryside. Geesh! We broke out onto some familiar rolling hills and the sun did, too. We had trees to visit in the last light of day. 

I have long since fallen in love with this row of white ashes, only to find them losing their bark this winter. Emerald ash borers are devastating our forest. Hey why not? Everybody else is. So, knowing these ashes are doomed, I take their portraits at every turn, because they will probably be gone a year from now. I call them the Samba Dancers. I particularly love the one who leans way out over the road, shaking her thing. All good things must pass, I'm told.

Just up the hill from them is my wee sassafras, the one who reaches and reaches without finding anything to stop her questing twig-fingers.

That crazy branch starting at the middle of the right side of the trunk and meandering its way into the sky makes me smile every time I see it. The other branches lean away from it as if they know it's crazy, and maybe a bit dangerous. It seems not to care that it could soon spoil the proportions and outlines of its mother tree. That branch is going for it.

The sun peeked out from behind its cloud-curtain and slammed golden light into the scene, throwing some branches into relief. I realized, looking at them from another angle, that the two branches on the lower right were going a bit wacky, too. That whole tree has got it going on. That sassafras is feeling itself.

Stepping closer, I looked over the hill and found a new scene beyond the little tree. 

I'm going to walk back there someday, see where it goes. 

How lucky can you get, to be able to seek out such landscapes whenever you please?

Just down the road is my Cold Mountain sassafras.  The scene looks like something from Antietam to me. A place where the rifle balls flew so thick and fast that what few trees remained standing had their branches blown off. It's timeless.

I love it in every light. Big clouds coming up behind, well, that's fine, too. 

Shila and I shot cloudscapes all the way home. There's another Civil War scene on our road, but this time the big oak belongs to us. That's a good feeling, to know that nobody's going to cut that tree but you, and you're never, ever going to lay a blade on it. This oak has some interesting branching, too, some lower limbs that are a bit out of proportion to the rest. I think that's what makes it beautiful.

Back home by the mailbox, the best was yet to come. Creamy sunset clouds and more white plastic. Plastic never looked so good, as Hodge has observed.

The light was bouncing from the clouds to the puddle to the plastic and back, and the hayrolls were floating somewhere in the middle of it all.

Another successful photo-expotition had come to its conclusion, by far the best three hours of that February Sunday.