I struggled with what to call this photograph I took along Piney Woods Church Road this evening. It really isn’t a sunset — that was still half an hour away when I took this photo. The Sun was descending behind a thunderhead cloud, and the lighting was lovely. But what was it? “Sun going behind large dark cloud” doesn’t quite express it. So I opted for “Sun’s Descent” despite its somber overtones. It seems to fit the photo well, and also is appropriate on the occasion of Memorial Day.
The late-day sun glows brightly beneath a young sweetgum leaf along Piney Woods Church Road.
Sunset arrives on the prairie (or, in this case, the nearest prairie equivalent along Piney Woods Church Road: the edge of a cow pasture near a barbed-wire fence, giant fire ant mound, and drainage ditch).
From my visit to a peach orchard in Culloden, Georgia, here are a few sunset photographs from yesterday.
Finally, an evening that was both warm enough and cloudy enough to offer the possibility of interesting sunset photography. I set out an hour early, taking a few desultory photographs here and there, then stopping to visit neighbors to chat for a few minutes, watching the sun sinking in the sky through their living room window out of the corner of my eye. My attention was captured by an odd snag on a pasture ridge. The most difficult part of the process for me today was not taking the picture (my hands never even went numb — what a delight) or even processing it (Picasa 3 offers pleasantly few choices compared to Photoshop or Lightroom). The problem this time was figuring out a title for the blog post. Everything I could come up with the word “sunset” in it sounded like either a cookie-cutter housing development or a New Age instrumental song title. Not that I have anything against them — New Age instrumentals, that is — but nothing felt right for the image. Finally, I abandoned the idea of sunset, and settled on the fact that it is also an “end of day” picture. There is something foreboding, almost apocalyptic, in it — I am haunted by the image of that strange snag. I wonder what happened to the tree it once was, and why it still stands there, alone against the sky.
Some of my photographs, such as the ice mural from yesterday, are very much premeditated creations. It was a brutally cold Tuesday afternoon, and I expected to find interesting ice patterns somewhere along Piney Woods Church Road. Once I saw the marvelous examples of frozen ice bubbles in rut marks, I knew I had my image for the day. Today’s photograph, on the other hand, was much more serendipitous. I anticipated a few clouds at sunset, since tomorrow is predicted to be mostly cloudy. What I did not anticipate (or discover, until I got home and reviewed my photographs) was the image below. It looks as if the tree branches and clouds are interacting with each other — the tree branches somehow pushing the cloud edges away.
