Of course it was bound to remind me of the Saturday morning last January immortialized in Get Out. Fresh snow overnight, clinging to every branch and blade, turning the world into a spun-sugar fairyland.
Okay…a bit much, I will admit it…but you know the mornings, you know the kind of snow fall I am talking about…Christmas-card/New-England-postcard snow…fragile, gone in the first good gust of wind, but achingly beautiful while it lasts. See…I just keep falling into cliche traps trying to describe it.
But, of course, there was something very different about this new morning snow.
It didn’t take me long to realize that it was the light.
There is a quality to spring morning light in southern Maine…it has the same power and presence, the same warmth as full summer light, but it comes in at low slant, bringing up the texture in everything it touches like a hand run the wrong way on velvet.
And then, too, it has not warmed the sky yet. The sky is still the intense blue of a clear winter’s day, with no dawn or sunset blush to match the angle of the light.
It is totally unique to a few days in early spring. When it combines with a late spring, clingy snow storm, the results are enough to draw any photographer out the door at 7AM, unshowered and unshaved, without morning tea or coffee, to catch it before it disappears. (Or the female equivalent thereof…maybe minus the shaving bit.)
As I went from the shore to the forest on the inner side of the sea marshes (driven by a still uncomfortably cold sea wind), I realized, once again, that photography is really all about light. Every image I took was really about the way this particular almost April morning light wrapped itself around the world…about the way this particular light came back from touching snow and tree and moss and bark…the way it wrote the world behind my eyes and across the digital sensor of the camera.
When I got back home, and downloaded the image files to my laptop, there I was, faced with a fine record of that light. Fine, but not perfect. No digital sensor is capable of catching the finer nuances of this particular light. The images were not disappointing…any one of them was close enough to be completely satisfying…but…from my recent experience of postprocessing…knew I could get closer.
It was a choice between doing it the hard way, with layers and curves and blending modes, or doing it the easy way with my beta of LightZone.
LightZone has a unique way of dealing with the levels and tones of the image…it uses metaphors like relight: which gives you control over the distribution of the tone zones in the image, right down to the way the fine details are sculpted. It has single selection styles: high contrast styles like WOW which combines relight and sharpen tools to make the image pop! Lighting styles like crisp which brings up the detail in the shadows and then across the image to so that it looks delicately etched. And of course each of these styles can be infinitely varied by adjusting the tools used.
So, with the memory of the morning still fresh, I opened the files in LightZone and brought them back closer to what I had really seen…removed that tiny amount of digital haze that clouds the best of digital images.
It is, after all, all about the light.
In posting the images to my flickr site I realized that no one of these images could capture the reality of the morning. It takes all of them to tell the story of the light.
So, for the real experience, let flickr provide a slide show.
And remember, it is all about the light.
