Sunday, January 31, 2010

Snow with sunshine...a new dawn



Here are a couple of images that don't all fit together. The first two are of this morning and my walk quite early before the sun was fully up. I kind of liked the relationships in the first photo of the cinderblock house and the truck and snow and the crab and ....well you'll see.

A little later on the dogs were ready to go off over the little Catpoint Creek bridge in quest of I don't know what, and we turned around and went home. Pretty spectacular ice on the road, but it started to melt later in the day.
We drove around and found that the main roads were in pretty good shape which bode well for Monday, whereas a lot of the back roads looked like they were going to be snow or ice covered for quite some time. When we took the regular way back, which I had seen was plowed this morning, we realized that although it was plowed there was room only for one vehicle and so we kept our fingers crossed. It happened though that in 4 miles we met with not a single vehicle. Still, neither of us will go out that way in the morning.




Saturday, January 30, 2010

Snow, silence and a committment to this site







Given that the snow has allowed me the time and ability to final start on this site, I will place three photos that recognize how beautiful it can be with snow on the ground. The photo in the upper left, that of our front yard, shows that we got perhaps 12 inches of snow today since the table has snow piled high.
Every day I either travel the Northern Neck, or walk the neighborhood and there is always something to look at and consider. There aren't always photo opportunities, but surprisingly even the most mundane scene can have a special moment which is exemplified by the little side road we live on, shown above when the sun was just coming up and there were layers of light being suffused through bits of fog. The mundane became beautiful.
The other shot is out over the Rappahannock river looking toward Tappahannock and the bridge. Kind of a traditional view with the pinks of the morning light, but nothing to complain about for a day-to-day scene.
Photographing on the Northern Neck is challenging. Often it is beautiful in a soft, sort of amorphous kind of way. You wonder where you can find the grit, the juxtaposition, the meat of this place. And sometimes it just appears. Some of these photos will be simply for information, some of them will hopefully be interesting or stimulating and some of them will be an illustration of how beautiful this world can be when you least expect it. We'll see how well I do.