Monday, April 5, 2010

Textures in Time

I like the textures in this photo of the trees in the distance, the ice, the water and the reeds at the edge. It's a photo that you cannot go back and experience again. You may find something similar, you may take the essence of what you saw and felt and find it in other places, but the ice is now melted, that swan has swum on, and the reeds are starting to bloom. So here's my last post of the winter, presented as an homage to the textural opportunities of our physical world.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Time 03.07.10

An earlier blog--Time 12.06.09--is the last dated photo I have of the log that I've been blogging about for a year. The lake is very high due to extraordinary rain, and so there's a slight chance that it's still there and covered by water, but I think that it's most likely gone. I believe it dislodged and broke in to pieces that I've seen at the water's edge. (One is shown above.)
This was a busy winter in many, many ways, and so I did not photograph the cold and heavy snows at the lake. I'm sorry that I did not stick to my practice because I can't do it next winter, time has moved on, and it's not the same. I don't have photos of the lake completely frozen, but trust me it was for a much longer time than usual. However, here's a photo of the ice as the edges melted. Note a piece of log in the foreground, and the way the gulls use the ice as a float to gather on.

Snow Dunes 02.16.10

There's something about snow at the edge of the water and on the dunes that feels intimate and intriguing. My husband and I went to Atlantic City in February to celebrate our 25th Anniversary. Tom and I grew up vacationing at the Jersey shore and we've taken our family there for all these years. But in the winter, the comfortable familiarity of a place you know is changed up by the elements.

That's where some of the intimacy comes from--the juxtaposition of the familiar and the new. There's a 'getting to know you' aspect of an off-season visit that reveals some of the challenges and vulnerabilities that are masked by the high vitality and drama of the regular season show.

The snow is a reminder that Atlantic City is after all a seaside resort that must weather the storms.




Between Rain and Ice 01.24.10



Rain and snow made the lake a mystical moist home for the swans and the flora and fauna of the lake. I kept wondering where the turtles go at these times. They don't migrate. They hibernate in their shells I suppose.

The gray mist has a delicate loveliness. I wonder if the swans miss the sun and warmth, or if they are equally at home between the rain and the ice.

Time 12.06.09


I've had this photo on my computer desktop and large monitor at work all winter. I love the colors the blue and the brown. It's a fashionable, sophisticated color combination at this time for clothing and interiors, and I hadn't really thought about that until now. I just like it. The colors are peaceful and the scene is quiet. There's nothing apparently extraordinary about this photo, yet the snow and contrasting shadows and the way there is still grass and some green poking through the icy white embed this scene firmly in one moment in time.

Taken on December 6, 2010 it may be one of the last times we'll see that familiar log in the lake. We've had a harsh winter, lots of snow, then lots of rain, and then lots of flooding. This was one of the early snowfalls (maybe the first, I can't remember.) We did not know what was coming. Time is like that. Infinity and expansiveness created from finite moments and specific details.

Easter Sunrise at the Lake

I was away from my blog for the entire winter. I was not however, away from the lake, or away from taking photographs. So on this gorgeous Easter morning, I'm going to sit here and catch up on the winter and post some photos.

However--blogs are about the present and so first, I'd like to note that we went to Easter Sunday Mass at the edge of the lake at sunrise this morning and it was engaging. My daughter, my husband and I and many of our close friends and about 500 other people were there. Though that sounds like a crowd, it was very intimate, and we didn't have to get to church 45 min early to get a seat and the whole mass was about 30 min, and we walked there watching the moon in the morning and walked home watching the sunrise over the lake.

Happy Easter!