Old Photos

The women were smiling, posing in a gondola before skiing down a mountain. They wore parkas with hoods. Their faces were glowing. 

It's a photo that found its way into a hospital room yesterday, cheering the patient who would no longer ski down a mountain but who, I hope, took heart from the image and the gesture, a kindness meant to stir up memories of a happier time.

The ability of an image to hearten and inspire ... it was on full display yesterday, and I marveled at its power. 

(This isn't that photo, but it's an old photo that always makes me smile.)

Black and White

When she was young, my daughter Celia once asked me if the past was lived only in black-and-white. It was a good question, I thought, since that's the way she'd seen it depicted in old photographs. 

But as those of us who've lived in the past (at least her past) can attest, it happens in color. 

I spent a few hours in the black-and-white past last night, perusing a book of photographs of Lexington, Kentucky. Many of the snapshots were taken in the 1930s, when my parents were children. There were the storefronts (including Leet's, owned by my great uncle), the interurbans (street cars that went into surrounding small towns) and the intersections (Main and Lime) of their youth.

While the photos were sepia-toned, I reminded myself that Mom and Dad saw these sights ... in color.

Raindrops on Roses

Not on roses, actually, but raindrops on the leaves of the elephant ear plant. Raindrops I first spotted a few weeks ago when I was out walking Copper on a moist morning. 

I marveled at the way the liquid pooled on the surface of the giant leaves, thought to myself, you must snap a photo of this.

But I came inside and immediately forgot the impulse. By the time I remembered, it was too late. The sun had warmed the leaves and the moisture had evaporated. 

The artistic imperative strikes when it strikes. It does not linger. Luckily, it rained again.

Shooting Rain

I'm an amateur photographer, doing the best I can with my iPhone 7 and enjoying every minute of it. I like framing the shot, trying to capture a digital image of what I see and want to preserve.

But sometimes I try to get technical, to shoot the difficult and ephemeral — to photograph the rain, for instance.

I wasn't sure I could do it, have tried before. But the rain in New York last month was falling so fast and furiously that I was able to snap this shot of it streaming through the skies, down the tenement fronts and into the rooftop pool of the newish hotel across the street.

This shot captures a moment and a downpour I won't soon forget. Water was streaming into the New York City subway system that evening, flooding major highways and making national news. 

What I didn't know then is that the rain would also delay the bass player from the band my cousin leads and in which my brother plays drums— the band we had come to New York to hear. And in fact, the drummer would end up missing all but three songs in the set. 

On the other hand, I did get an interesting rain photo out of it. 

Still Life with Hay Bales

Last evening in the golden hour of slanted light, I walked up the road a quarter mile to a field I've been seeing on our drives.  My goal: to capture "on film" a field of daisies. 

But the daisies were a little too far away and the traffic was whipping around me as I stood on the scant shoulder, so I made quick work of the shot. On the way back, though, I raised my phone to photograph another beautiful field, green grass studded with hay bales lit by the lowering sun. 

I'd actually crunched and marched my way across this field when I thought I could reach the daises on foot, before I discovered the rusty wire fence and the treed border. I'd taken some photos of the hay bales from that angle and found them lacking.

But up above, on the berm, I could capture the sunlight and the shadows— beauty on a larger scale. Proof, once again, of the power of perspective.