While half the country now lies under a blanket of white snow, along Piney Woods Church Road, a small white flower with a yellow center in the Asteraceae family has come into bloom. I have not idea what it is, but it adds a note of hope to winter’s approach, gracing the roadside with its delicate form.
Whenever I need another surge of photographic inspiration, I know that I need only seek out a vine with tendrils, and some enchanting bit of calligraphy will emerge. I was drawn to the way the light played across the edge of a recurving tendril in this photograph from Piney Woods Church Road earlier this afternoon.
Along Piney Woods Church Road grow many plants, including stately oak and hickory trees, weedy sassafras and loblolly pine trees, and dozens of shrubs and ground plants, both annuals and perennials. Amongst them all, many are quite photogenic and invite me to return to them again and again as the seasons advance: muscadine grape, greenbrier, and white oak fall firmly into this category. Then there is dog fennel (Eupatorium capillifolium): tall (several feet), gangly, frilly, with nondescript flowers and seeds, and a pungent yet not particularly pleasant aroma. Today, a dog fennel plant was in seed alongside the road, illuminated by the afternoon sun. I dedicated myself to taking its portrait. The result is the two “experiments” below.
A single sweetgum leaf against the deep blue sky…play of light and shadow…texture of leaf surface, patterns of veins…..
On my way to an early morning appointment, I stopped the car at a drainage ditch along Piney Woods Church Road. After months of being dry, the ditch had filled with water after yesterday morning’s rainfall. In the bitter cold that has followed, the water as iced over, leaving patterns of water bubbles near the surface. Below are three photos of the bubbles, converted to black and white with a dark blue filter applied. I find myself entranced by these frozen patterns of concentric circles.
I set out for Piney Woods Church Road shortly after noon today, the overnight rain having ended and the promised wind still building. It was a chilly, damp day, but nothing like the wintery conditions anticipated for tomorrow — temperatures not rising out of the mid-30s with wind chills in the mid-20s. As I strolled down the road, I noticed many more leaves that had fallen onto the roadbed; and I offer for today these three portraits: in order, A Conversation; Solitude; and Symmetry.
From a rather melancholy walk under leaden skies, I offer these two images as poems to the wind. The air is mostly still now, but heavy rain is anticipated for the overnight hours, after many weeks without precipitation. Change is coming, but all I feel today is a longing for things that once were.
This time of year, I find tree leaves, particularly those backlit by the late-day sunlight, absolutely entrancing. And this is particularly true of white oaks, whose leaves evoke satellite images of foreign landscapes. Veins form patterns of rivers or roads, patches of lingering green the forest cover. Like maps, the leaf patterns kindle a yearning for exploration, and awaken memories of childhood days outdoors, pretending I was in Middle Earth, or perhaps an imaginary world of my own devising, inspired by Bridge to Terabithia.
I did not notice until returning home from my late-afternoon walk how wonderfully these two leaf portraits go together: still-green white oak leaf against blue sky, fallen brown hickory leaf against the dark earth.
Winter is on the way. Today was cloudy and blustery; the wind was strong enough to leave my bare fingers almost numb. The sun almost broke through the clouds, enough for me to cast my shadow against a tree, before retreating again behind a wall of dark gray. At my feet, though, I passed an endless variety of tranquil still-lifes, my favorite of which was this simple image with shades of red, yellow, and green.
