The Online Photographer

It's getting lighter. (...In the Northern hemisphere.)

Observed: tonight there was still a little light left in the sky at 6:10 p.m. I love it.

Sunset in nearby Rochester was at 5:39 tonight, versus the earliest sunset time, which was 4:35 on December 2nd through 14th. And, there are only 29 more days to go until Daylight Savings Time, when sunset will be an hour later. (I actually favor abolishing DST, but, as long as it's a fact of life, I do enjoy the Springtime shift. I was up before sunrise this morning, but I'm more likely to enjoy the added daylight at the tail end of the day.)

It makes me laugh now, but I distinctly remember that I was in my twenties before I was fully conscious of the fact that there's less daylight in the Wintertime. As young people we all seem to neglect to bring our attention to bear on sundry common and/or obvious facts; it's just that those facts which escape our attention are different for each of us. The most common are probably words—most people saunter into adulthood with a number of misconstrued words still in their heads. As life goes on we sort those things out: the average 60-year-old knows four times as much as the average 20-year-old.

Or, perhaps I should only say that I probably know four times as much now as I did when I was twenty. The difference is that I thought I knew more than I actually did when I was twenty, and now I'm much more conscious of all the things I don't know.

These days, I'm exquisitely sensitive to light. It changes my mood. My house is small, which gives it a lot of surface area, which means plenty of windows, and so the interior transforms on sunny days. I treasure those long Summer days that are drenched in light. Looking forward to them feels more and more like hope. The ebb and flow of the longer and shorter days as each year progresses looms larger and larger for me as time goes by.

Sometimes I wonder: is it photography I love, or merely light?

Mike

Book o' This Week:

In honor of Black History Month, an eloquent Black voice on the issue of race. Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's much-lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents is a book for our historical moment.

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases."

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "Re '...As life goes on we sort those things out: the average 60-year-old knows four times as much as the average 20-year-old....' I think many twenty-somethings know technology at a level that smokes me in my mid-60s. I've never streamed anything, never heard a podcast or used 10 percent of the capability of my phone.

"You are correct, though, if we are talking about the natural world. While in the military, I was a mid-level leader of a group that deployed to the Saudi desert for the first Gulf War. We arrived in total darkness after 20 hours on a plane. After a few hours, the sun started to crest the horizon, so I said, 'well, that's the East.' One of the young teenaged troops ask how I could know that, to which I replied, 'the sun comes up in the East.' He looked at me like I was crazy saying, 'only in the States, not in other countries!' That kid could no doubt do anything on a computer, but he didn't know the earth rotates in one direction."

Mike replies: Perfect example of what I was talking about. And funny, too! Thanks, Albert.

RubyT: "I have similar reactions to light. We recently moved from Tennessee to Colorado partly because Tennessee is so cloudy and the older I get the more I miss the sunshine of growing up in the west (but Austin, where I grew up, is just too hot).

"As a child I always loved looking at pictures of jewelry and gems. I was in my forties before I put together that jewelry and photography are both really about appreciating the interaction of light and objects."

Mike replies: You would get on well with my brother Dr. Charlie. He taught himself to facet gemstones when he was 14, and has been an amateur gemologist all his life. He talked his way into spending half his senior year in high school working at the Gemology Department at the Smithsonian. He trained himself to be a pretty fair gem photographer, too.

Cary Talbot: "Honestly, I don't know how you can love photography and not love light. Seeing some awesome light hitting a subject or scene is what makes me want to get a camera out and know how to capture that moment so it can be relived and shared. It's always all about the light for me. Even the most incredible vista is simply meh in flat, uninteresting light."

Douglas Orr: "Back in August 2017, I wrote this about light: As a photographer, I have always appreciated good light. But exposure to a copious amount of light is also soothing to the soul. When we are outdoors, communing with our natural surroundings, I am not certain that out of all the ways our senses are being stimulated, that we fully understand how important exposure to sunlight is to our joyful mood. I have been more keenly made aware of this effect after the addition of a sunroom to our homestead. Our new glass-walled room overlooks a treed lot, a northern sky, and the adjacent deck is populated with four bird feeders and potted plants. Spending time daily in this sunlit room allows for me to more acutely observe the dancing nuances of nature's subtle light progressions, the wildlife activity, and seems to elevate my spirit."