The Camera’s Moment

Dogs in Night Snow, 2021, Archival Digital Print

A brief snowfall last night during our last walk gave a Holiday Card Moment. The camera converts the flakes to darting sticks implying an experience of mean sleet rather than soft snow.  The reality was the sweet slow fall of soft flakes.  The marvel of the camera and its ability to create a different reality from fact effects so much in our world now.  It also points out in high relief how incapable viewers are of perceiving the difference.

 

Sleet, Mean, Cold but Who Cares?

Kool and The Gang, Archival Digital Photo, 2021

It’s miserable outside, but the flock is tough and takes the weather with a much better attitude than I do. I’m calling Zach, Kool today because he thinks he’s the most important Goose in Columbia Country, maybe even all of New York State.  He’s intruding on my nicely composed photograph and doesn’t care because the world revolves around him. This is Gander Narcissism in its full expression. Ruthie, his wife, is in the foreground blending into the land.

Reverberation

Plane, 2021, Archival Digital Print

Yesterday morning a single-engine plane flew low back and forth overhead.  Its target was the big apple orchard behind my neighbor’s land.  Its insect buzz was alarming even though I knew what it was doing.  Fruit farmers hire these flyers to spread fertilizer or anti-fungal chemicals, but in the very cold weather they are used to stir up the air and bring down the heated air toward the ground.  I was already feeling as if I were channeling the Blitz and tasted the terror of WWII, and the shot I got as it went on a loop over the house confirmed it.  The power of images to set a place and a time — even one I never experienced except through media — is real.