Tiny Toes

The baby was only nine days old when I visited her home to photograph her and her parents.

Perfect

A few years ago I photographed the baby’s parents on their wedding day and it was a wonderful wedding.  Married in a park under a tree they made their promises beside a river.

And  now they have brought home a beautiful baby girl.  She is just perfect and making pictures of her  reminded me that I am in a lot of happy rooms and get to share many days of joy.   The babies are the best.   We fed her well before we started to take pictures and she posed like a pro.   We dressed her in a Santa hat for Christmas Cards and in the pink outfit that Grandma had given her.

Love

I took the toes and the little hands and as many pictures of the parents and the baby as we could.  It was a special day for me.  Really Photographers get to contribute to the family histories.

Tiny Perfection

Second Hand Rose

“That is the Strangest Picture of a rose I have ever seen”

So said my husband when I showed him this one.  I often use the phrase “Too much Art School”. When I was in college, I spent lots of my time behind an easel  as a painting student.   On into graduate school, I continued to study painting.   What I would call traditional art is absolute complete freedom .   The only constraints are those of the materials and your ability to work with them.  You can create things that exist only in your own little mind.    That is so much fun.  And you can go beyond any reason while you do this.

And in the digital art you can do much the same.  You can draw, you can paint.  You can create the unreal world of your own imagining.

And then there is Photography.

You have to put something into the camera to start with.     Once it is inside my little black box I can dump it into the computer and play.    Did I write PLAY?   Work, No it is WORK.   If I say play will people pay me for it?  Oh dear I have let out the secret.  I had a great teacher in art school who claimed daily the art was just play for grown-ups.   I play.   It is fun most of the time.  I cannot leave a picture alone.   I change.  I add.  I drop other pictures over it and under it until I am happy with it or I totally give up.  That totally giving up thing happens more that I would like to admit.   Sometimes I just delete and go back to the beginning.   Most of the pictures never see the outside of the computer.   Most do not deserve to see the outside of the computer.    But once in a while it all works out and I have one I like.

Well,  I like this one.   This strange rose.   Would any other person on the planet like it?  Perhaps or maybe I am totally alone in my  opinion.  It is really about the rose. It is about me and what I feel about it.

A child turns toward you at the grocery store and you see his entire story in his eyes and you know that this is a picture that transcends, but you are in the grocery store and you do not have a camera and the parent might call the police if you had a camera anyway.

You dive by an old abandoned  building every day for years and you say to yourself, “I must come to photograph that building.   And then one day it is gone, torn down or collapsed.  It is gone and so are the pictures you had so carefully planned.

So what does it mean?  I guess that it is not just the pictures that we miss.  We are going to ___________ (fill in your own wish or plan).   We will do that after _________.   We will get that as soon as ______________.   But something changes or someone leaves your life or you find that you are not able to go there or visit her.

Let’s not forget to take the picture today.  It may not be there in the morning.

Much after those days, I moved to a very quiet place.   It was in the middle of the worst winter ever in that little town and the property  had trees and more trees.   There were giant White Birches and Evergreens, the variety of which I am uncertain.  And there was snow.   The last family to live in that house had mounted a motion detecting light high on a tree at the edge of the driveway.  And when the snow fell, the light would come on.   I could see it through the large window in the kitchen.   White snow, black and white trees, all moving in the wind.  It was a place where winter was long and snow was frequent.  How many hours I spent in the kitchen watching the trees.

Yet I did not particularly photograph trees.   Perhaps all the city years had caused me to see the man made, the industrial images.   The trees  many Falls show up here and there.  In New England, one cannot ignore  Fall Color.  A friend said once that Fall in New England is Nature’s apology for what it is about to bring down upon one.  And then it was time to leave New England and the places of the past.  We drove south and west on a very cold morning.  There was snow in Pennsylvania that morning and it seemed as if the sun would never rise behind as I drove my car with all four of the cats.

In Virginia, I have turned to the trees.   They seem to be there in front of the lens.  And there is the sky.   The wide sky of The Valley.  Sometimes there is not color but gray and mist and then there are evenings bright red or gold.  Does the color come from all the mountains?

There are not very many White Birch trees here.  I have one little clump growing near my house.  It is young and so far the bark is beginning to turn white.  I am told that it will not grow easily here but there may be a time for snow on white bark once more.

I see trees more and more in my work lately.  For the last year, I have been aware of the condition of the trees. Parts break away and fall to the ground.  Some are broken by the wind or the lightning.  Some branches just break for reasons I cannot see.  Once in a  while, the broken limbs hang from the trunk, waiting to fall.   At the edge of our woods one giant limb fell but was caught by two other trees and that limb now sits horizontally in the branches of those trees, saved from its final and inevitable fall. The trees , though broken, live on in their altered form, less perfect that they were but still living.  Some of the trees die but refuse to fall for years, hanging on.

The tree are like we are.  In youth, we are more perfect than we know.  But time or trouble may fell us altogether like a lightning storm that comes up on a warm summer afternoon.    More often, we break apart a branch at a time, losing parts of ourselves slowly , but going on.  We are victims of the day to day storms, some internal, that break us.   Parts fall away completely or  still hang to be dragged along. We feel the weight.  Once in a while, we are rescued by a nearby tree that will share the weight of the broken parts  and we are given more time.   Mostly bit by bit, we grow smaller and weaker until that day when a storm comes and we fall away.

I was coming home just as it grew dark a few days ago when I saw the brilliant reflection of the sky in the water.  I almost did not stop because it was already too dark to use the camera.    This needed a tripod but I had no time to set up anything so I adjusted the camera as well as I could and braced it on a fencepost.   Sometimes you are lucky.  I went back again today but it wasn’t the same.  Pictures, all of them are a once in a lifetime deal.  You never have it again.  Even in a second, it is gone away.

Will the light on the loch ever be the same again?  I will keep  looking but I will not expect it.

Once again, welcome to my blog.

Susan.