Light can mean so many things: lighten your load, lighten up, see the light, light-headed, light-hearted, light a fire under someone, and so on. It wasn’t till I spent time in the South that I realized that the light has another meaning: a lush, soft illumination that feels distinctly Southern.
Maybe it’s the moisture in the air, or the fact there there is so much water everywhere: lakes, rivers, streams, and that stuff that falls from the sky. A lot. (As I write this, I’m in the middle of an afternoon-long tornado watch, so rain is on my mind.)
Reflections are one of the ways I love to play with light and water together. It’s constantly different, the view changing from minute to minute as the sun and clouds play a game of tag in the sky over my head.
As Spring comes to the South, I find myself peeking at the sun through bright green leaves and tall trees. The light does indeed dapple the leaves, as I’d read about in storybooks when I was a kid.
At the end of the day, the light slowly fades, signaling time to stop working on whatever has my attention. I try to remember to look – to really see – the golden hour, the sunset, and then the blue hour. I watch the last of the light fade into night. I breathe slowly and think through my day: good things, hard moments, and things accomplished.
Sometimes, the end of day reflection shows that not much went as planned. Kind of like my yesterday. I spent the entire day fighting an infestation of ants in my trailer. Instead of relaxing, I made a run into town for ant killer items, then came back and cleared out three of the four storage areas of my trailer, killed 99.5% of the ants, and then reassembled everything so that I could make dinner and have a place to sleep.
I was too tired to go out and try for a daily photo, so I just downloaded what I had in my camera, not really remembering everything I’d shot last week. Despite all the pretty blues and greens in most of the photos, this stark monochrome image caught my eye.
This shot was way overexposed (the Minolta lens I was using doesn’t have auto-exposure) but I actually liked how it turned out. It reminded me that even hard days and harsh light have their uses: my trailer is now really clean, and this image made it onto my website.
When you look on the bright side, you’re acknowledging that there is a dark side at which you are choosing not to gaze.
Srikumar Rao
Beautiful words & pics
Thank you, Ann! Hope it also reminds you of your brief stay at Modoc 🙂
Absolutely love this!