Blues & Pinks

I had read about artists moving to specific locations for the quality of light found in those places. It was a concept the eluded me until, rather late in life, I picked up a camera and began to try to make pictures. I lived in Point Hope, Alaska at the time – 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. There were periods during the spring and fall when the sun lingered on the horizon for a good part of the day. The soft hues of pink, purple, red, orange, gold, yellow and lilac bathing the snow and ice covered landscape was… amazing.

Although early morning and late evening periods of beautiful light would have been more brief in other places I’d lived in and visited, surely that light was present. But I had missed it. In my pre-photography days, I thought of light mainly in terms of its brightness: enough to see by or not; sufficient to read by or to tie on a fly, or not; bright, too bright, not bright enough, absent. And because that’s how I thought of light, that’s how I saw it – an example of selective, self-imposed blindness that might apply to anything from preconceiving the results of a scientific experiment to being incapable of observing a solution right in front of one’s eyes… or whether or not the object of one’s affection is returning that affection.

If I ever go back to Pennsylvania, it will be one of the first things I look for: morning and evening light. Surely there must be moments when it softly colors the landscape -the rounded mountains forested in mixed trees, the trout streams, a lady’s slipper orchid or an abandoned apple orchard. Now that I can see…

The most challenging element in making a photograph such as this is the camera. Put simply, there is no camera sensor that can fully capture the subtle and brilliant range of colors the human eye can discern. This is where the photographer – at least this photographer – admires the painter who is in possession of a broader and more subtle palette of colors. Still, even with a Monet, the end result is only a proximation of what was seen by being there. Chignik Lake, January 9, 2017, 3:07 PM. (Nikon D800, 17-35mm f/2.8, 2.0 @ f/22, ISO 100, 22mm)