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From the inside of a southbound Amtrak train in northern New Jersey, on April 12, 2017, at 6:10:26 PM (and yes, I still miss seeing the Twin Towers).
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Archive for the ‘Nature’ Category
2017 Photographs: Manhattan Downsized in the Distance
Wednesday, January 3rd, 20182017 Photographs: The Cloud
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018They say life’s ultimate bliss is to be on Cloud 9., but that makes no sense to me.
Here’s a cloud I photographed while in Glover Park looking skyward on May 31, 2017, at 2:02:17 PM. Considering its level of blissfulness, I rate this one a Cloud 10. It’s the one I want to catch a ride on.
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The sky above Glover Park, Washington DC, facing East, on May 31, 2017, at 2:02:17 PM.
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A companion 58-second video showing more of the blue and puffy-clouded celestial dome above Glover Park that afternoon is available on Vimeo, here.
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Footprints of small dogs and their big companions
Saturday, December 30th, 2017Sidewalks this morning were dusted with a light coating of snow — just enough to record these imprints.
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Ginkgo Leaf Drop
Sunday, November 19th, 2017Cold weather was overdue in Washington, DC, and so it was no surprise to us when an overnight freeze on November 11th hit the ginkgo trees in the neighborhood. A day before the youngest specimens still sported bright summer green. And so the freeze, and the ginkgo specie’s traditional all-at-once leaf dump that followed immediately, created a pile of leaves not of the usual autumn gold, but of this hue:
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A few days later, though, when the oldest trees shed their final bits of raiment, the natural order of things was righted. A tradition was restored.
Sidewalks paved with gold:
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On the Day of the Eclipse – Looking Down
Monday, August 21st, 2017During the height of the solar eclipse this afternoon in Washington, DC, when the moon occluded 82% of the sun’s disc, a neighbor pointed out to me how strangely the sun’s remaining light was filtering through the foliage of the large Japanese maple tree in my front yard. Openings in the tree canopy were operating as pinhole projectors. The sidewalk became a canvas for dozens of elusive, feather-like crescent shapes. You sensed this was a strange visitation, one that would prove to be ephemeral.
(Click on photo to enlarge its details.)
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Washington, DC, April 21, 2017, 2:52:59 PM
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April 21, 2017, 2:57:00 PM
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April 21, 2017, 2:50:44 PM
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By way of comparison, this final photograph, taken nearly an hour after the eclipse had passed and after a brief rain shower, shows the normal appearance of full-disc sunshine when filtered through the tree over the same sidewalk.
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April 21, 2017, 3:45:49 PM
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A friend informed me that Billy Ray Cyrus posted on Twitter his photo of the same phenomenon.
The Tobacco Barns of Calvert County – No. 1
Sunday, April 9th, 2017If you travel the country roads of southern Maryland’s Calvert County, you are sure to come upon many tobacco barns. They are remnants of a once thriving tobacco-growing industry. While a few barns survive in good condition, most are falling victim to disrepair and the ruinous forces of nature.
I’m intrigued by these large wooden structures. There is beauty in them. Character, too. Large and simple in form, they command the landscape with a presence somehow both rustic and majestic.
From time-to-time I plan to post photos of favorite examples.
First up: A tobacco barn located in northern Calvert County at the meeting of Vanous Road and Jewell Road, photographed April 8, 2017, shortly before sunset. The second photograph catches the rising moon, in its waxing gibbous phase, trying to touch the apex of the barn’s western facade.
Click on the photos to enlarge.
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Dusk over Chesapeake Bay – Six Photos
Friday, January 6th, 2017.
This is a series of photos of the water and atmosphere of Chesapeake Bay captured at dusk on December 27, 2016, at 4:42 PM. Click each photo for a full-screen view.
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Nature and Protest in America
Sunday, November 13th, 2016.
Washington DC, Glover-Archbold Park, Friday, November 11, 2016 at 2:42 and 2:46 pm.
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New York City, Fifth Ave. at 30th St., Saturday, November 12, 2016 at 2:16 pm.
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WONDER at the Renwick Gallery
Monday, September 5th, 2016The 2015 reopening of the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, was celebrated with an exhibition featuring the work of nine contemporary artists. Five women and four men created site-specific installations that occupied and transformed the museum’s refurbished gallery spaces. Over a period of 8 months, visitors found themselves immersed in wonders indeed. Official photographs of the event can seen at the online gallery, here. Below are photos of three of the nine rooms that I took during my visit in April, 2016. Descriptions of the artists’ works quoted below are borrowed from the Renwick Gallery’s wall texts, found here.
Maya Lin, Folding the Chesapeake (installation, 2015)
“Growing up in Ohio in the 1960s, Lin watched her father participate in the fledgling studio glass movement then gathering steam in nearby Toledo. The marbles used in this installation are the same industrial fiberglass product Henry Huan Lin and other glass-blowing pioneers experimented with then, which were soon abandoned by artists as technical knowledge matured. Folding the Chesapeake marks their first use by Maya Lin and a new chapter in her decades-long investigation of natural wonders. By shaping rivers, fields, canyons, and mountains within the museum, Lin shifts our attention to their outdoor counterparts, sharpening our focus on the need for their conservation.”
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Gabriel Dawe, Plexus A1 (installation, 2015)
“Dawe’s architecturally scaled weavings are often mistaken for fleeting rays of light. It is an appropriate trick of the eye, as the artist was inspired to use thread in this fashion by memories of the skies above Mexico City and East Texas, his childhood and current homes, respectively. The material and vivid colors also recall the embroideries everywhere in production during Dawe’s upbringing.”
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Tara Donovan, Untitled , 2014, © Tara Donovan, courtesy of Pace Gallery
“Employing mundane materials such as toothpicks, straws, Styrofoam cups, scotch tape, and index cards, Donovan gathers up the things we think we know, transforming the familiar into the unrecognizable through overwhelming accumulation. The resulting enigmatic landscapes force us to wonder just what it is we are looking at and how to respond. The mystery, and the potential for any material in her hands to capture it, prompts us to pay better attention to our surroundings, permitting the everyday to catch us up again.”
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What Man Says, What Nature Says
Saturday, January 30th, 2016.
Photos of Glover Park yesterday at dusk: a hand-printed sign guarding a shoveled-out parking space, and a sunset view from the edge of the park.
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More examples of parking-space “dibs” signs, made by city folks in DC and Philadelphia as they dug their way out of the blizzard of 2016, can be found here.