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.

These Grand Ohio Skies

 

 My entire trip home from Ithaca, all nine hours of it, was a sky show such as I've rarely experienced. Since I've bewcome such an avid iPhone photographer, I truly believe I appreciate clouds more. It's sort of like hunters say they love and understand deer (or whatever they're stalking) more because they hunt them. I see a magnificent skyscape, and I start plotting how best to capture it and keep it for myself. I watch for breaks in the hills and powerlines, good places to pull off, clear spots in the traffic. I'm stalking these clouds.

As breathtaking as the skies were in New York, Ohio had her cloudscapes all dressed up and waiting in the wings. And out they danced, one after another.

I have an absolute thing for anvilhead cumulonimbus. I adore this shot, with Ohio's omnipresent and iconic orange barrels standing watch. Really, it's time to take them down. They're a summer thing. It's like the buzzards returning to Hinkley. Summer comes, and ODOT rolls out the orange barrels to squeeze our already narrow highway passages down to one lane and make us all slow down to 55. That, or get ticketed. Which we do, we do.

But it was to get even more surreal, when a car bombed my next shot of this incredible autumnal landscape. 

 I was pulled over, just shooting away at these perfect hills and this killer sky. I wondered about everyone else, hurtling along. Were they experiencing an advanced and heightened state of rapture as was I?

The particular strength of the iPhone camera is its ability not to be so overwhelmed by bright sky that the land color and detail is lost. I remember so clearly my disappointment with my early Canon film camera, and later my Rebel, for its one-or-the-other approach to sky and land. A professional photographer explained it this way: Either you take your exposure on the sky, and capture that, with the land going completely dark, or you expose on the land and lose the sky, all its whites blown out. Later, I got a Canon GS-11, followed by a GS-12, and it was obvious that Canon had been working on that particular problem. I'm a little chagrined to say that the iPhone has rendered my blocky little Canon GS obsolete. I can actually do more with the iPhone.  Somehow, the iPhone knows that I want to capture both land and sky in perfect exposure. Sure, I have to do a little fiddling sometimes in post processing, which I never had before digital cameras came along. I'll sometimes open up the shadows on the landscape in iPhoto, but I do precious little fiddling. The iPhone 4S camera captures it all. And I love it for that. That, and the fact that it's always with me. No moment, no vista, goes unrecorded. Yay.

I kept my eye on that anvilhead,  rolled on a little farther, and BOOM there was the dilapidated barn and silo just waiting for me. All I had to do was compose the shot. Holy cow. Yes. Ohio is beautiful. You coast-huggin' people ought to give it a chance.

This experience only reinforces my contention that making a habit of photography makes us much more sensitive to beauty. It turns us into artists and composers. More importantly, it turns us into true appreciators. And the best part is you don't have to have "talent." How many times have I heard, "Oh I wish I could paint like you. You're so talented." Well, having started out as a kid able only to scribble, I believe that talent is more or less equivalent to hard work, and yes, we have to work and study to learn how to paint. We can't just wish it into being. On the other hand, anybody can paint like this, because we all have eyes, and almost everybody reading this has a cameraphone these days.

There were some very special things happening with sunbeams, brilliant green hills, and dark clouds. I started shooting through the windshield as I often do when seeing something amazing.

 

Rolled down the window and went for the unencumbered shot.

And boom! there was a green hill, and a beam spotlighting it, pointing to I don't know what. I always love the dark clouds that cross white ones, the violet-purple ones marching along the horizon. It all makes me want to get out of the darn car and walk those hills. It also makes me want to paint them. I have a fantasy where I chuck it all and just start painting watercolor landscapes, using these ephemeral photos as inspiration. It's nice to have a pipe dream. It's cuddled up against the one about having a specialty mail-order greenhouse growing odd little plants that I love. I think the growing would be a lot more fun than the order fulfilling. Maybe I could grow them for someone else who had an established business.

Soon, I came to our exit (these were all taken along I-77 South in Ohio) and I raced along our ridge to catch the last sunlight on sugar maples.

It's all so ephemeral, so quickly gone. I have to roll around in it while it's here, this light, these leaves. 

I'm thankful for sugar maples and cerulean skies, for slanted evening sun, for whatever basket of beauty the day brings.

By the time we reached The Three Graces, the light was gone, gone like the moa is gone. Color drained out of the landscape. The Graces all decided to go with understated Homecoming gowns this year. They didn't want to upstage each other. Red Maple (left) took it easy, as did Sugar Maple (center). And even gaudy Tupelo (right) decided against flaming red, her usual choice.

 

Whatever they choose, they're perfect and always beautiful.