The Daily Photograph™

Amid the clouds, a light

The moon has a dark side

And it will never be known, no matter how often we walk its surface. The moon keeps its secrets, even in the light. Gaze not so long.

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Sadly, this photograph is not technically good enough to work into full artfulness. I forgot the need to lock the camera viewing mirror in place. You can’t see it here, but the resulting shake at a slow shutter speed caused a slight blurring that won’t take much enlargement.

No matter how often, it's always new, again

I am blessed to live here

Near a mountain that lifts me up, two thousand feet above the horizon, so I can see and show this kind of magnificence.

It is a common failing among photographers to be ensnared by the spectacular. Much is amazing in this world, but again, more is mundane, and that in itself is amazing. I have always tried to present the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way.

Here, we have an ordinary sunset. Not at all an item of spectacle. That’s what I tell myself. And I almost believe it.

Never the same two seconds running

I never could leave well-enough alone

Even when the first thing seems as good as it’s going to get. This photograph was made about a half-minute after the one I posted yesterday. Shooting directly into the sun is not advised. It’s hard on the eyes and hard on the very delicate sensor. I had the lens stopped down as far as it would go (1/500s f32) and still the sun ‘blew out’ the open area in the clouds. And, we see some interesting solorization effects on the edge of the opening.

If I work this one up to a finished piece, I will bring up the foreground. It was not as dark as it appears either here or in yesterday’s post.

Something unexpected, something grand

This is not what I drove out to find

I had expected to photograph the light on the red bluffs on the other side of Jackson Canyon, the ones you can’t see because they are behind me. These clouds spoiled the piece I had hoped to make, by interfering and blocking the light I needed to complete my plan. They paid me back, I think.

Even messes have beauty

It’s a scientific fact that chaos is symmetrical

And a lot of people were surprised when Felix Mandelbrot showed that many forms in nature repeat recursively down to the submicroscopic level.

Here we have the chaos of a small construction project — a picnic shelter in a park — and the beauty of its design. Nobody planned for symmetry and order, but still it shows its face. The fine sunset light was a bonus I didn’t expect. The light has been harsh during the last few days, but tonight, the Western horizon had just enough mist (and maybe dust) to give us the ‘golden hour,’ which lasts perhaps 15-20 minutes most days.

It's an old, upright, music machine

You say it’s a cliché?

Very well, it’s a cliché. It contains multitudes.

This machine can play anything, from Claire dé Lune, to Crocodile Rock. I especially liked to hear my daughter play “Für Elise” on this piano. She was right about the phrasing. I was wrong.

This photograph is an exercise to determine the effective range of focus of a particular lens. As you can see, the range is very narrow, about an inch and a half at eight feet.

Give it a couple of months

As a child, I was fascinated

To see the Moon in daylight. It seemed a terrible contradiction in terms.

It still does.

If I were to work this into a piece of finished art, I’d remove the scraggly branches at the bottom of the frame. Sometimes Nature is so untidy.

The Bear gets the roses

The Bear Is Strong

And a leader, in Southwestern mythology. The Bear is often mentioned as “first helper” in the various creation and emergence stories of the pueblo and desert peoples.

The rose? Everybody needs roses.

They are big and tough

Cottonwoods last about 50 years

Before their limbs dry up and break off and the tree eventually dies. This one is about fifty years old. Many of its siblings are already gone.

Those who went Westering along the Oregon/California/Mormon trail welcomed the sight of a cottonwood the horizon, for it meant a stream or at least a watercourse was close by. This one is on the west bank of Sage Creek.

Breath Deep Amid the Pine and the Sage.

Gloom means the time of twilight

Just as the sun departs, night arrives and the Gloom is that time between. Sometimes metaphors get in the way of a really good word. The word has come to mean an indrawn mood of sadness and loss, and yet, as the Moody Blues declared, At Twilight Time “…fantasy strides, over colourfull skies/ Of form disappearing from view.”

I found a good place to watch that happen.