sky

The Wooden Stairs to Nowhere

I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but I find myself, more often than not, failing to post-process my HDR brackets as promptly and as quickly as I should. Â Typically, I’ll end up only working on a few sets of many hundred sets I may have harvested on a particular trip. Â It’s always a treat for me to go back to my archives to dig up some long forgotten brackets to work them up, finally, and to share them with all of you. Â This is one of those shots that almost did not see the light of day because I had forgotten them on one of the hard-drives I had unceremoniously tossed into a corner. Â This happen to any of you out there? Â I imagine I’m not alone on this.

The Fire at the Edge of Night

On the way to a friend’s “Home on the Range” (I mean that literally) near Redding, CA, riding along a dirt road that took us deeper and deeper into the “wild, wild west”, I spotted this cool pond reflecting the trees and sky beyond. I knew I’d have an appointment with destiny here, at this very spot, in about an hour, when the sun started racing into oblivion. And that’s exactly what I did. While it might have been nice to have my big guns along, I had left those on the East Coast. But I had my backup tucked into my waistband and I wasn’t afraid to use it. After the obligatory seven paces, I drew my iPhone and fired. And it was I who was left standing when the sun went down!

Where I felt the presence of God

This afternoon, my daughter and I took the dog down to this frozen lake for a walk.Â I sure was glad that I had tucked my small Leica D-Lux 5 camera into my pocket, because what we beheld there was heavenly.Â The colorful sky, the cotton-candy like clouds, the mist surrounding us…Â pure beauty …pure peace.Â I knew that I needed a special song playing to process this image, so I chose the beautiful mix by U.N.K.L.E. (featuring Moby) called God Moving Over the Face of the Water / A State. Take a listen, won’t you, while you look at this photograph and maybe you’ll be able to get a sense of the feeling I had at the frozen lake shore.Â If you want to see the lyrics for the song you can find them here.Â I’ve pasted my favorite part of the lyrics under the photograph.

Fronted by solitude without decadence or a…
Single material thing to prostitute and elevate you to a spiritual plane
Where I felt the presence of God
Now, there’s the God they taught me about at school
And there is the God that’s hidden… by what surrounds us in this civilization
That’s the God I meant

~ Sung by UNKLE

By the way, the above lyrics originally appeared in the movie Alive (1993), the amazing story about the survivors of Uruguayan Air Flight 571.Â That film was based upon the 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by British author Piers Paul Reed.Â It was one of my favorite books when I was a wee lad.