I took Luna down to the Crystal Lake sports fields this morning. As we walked, the dense mist swiftly yielded to the touch of sunlight filtering through branches and over the treetops. The Fields often carry the last mist of the morning in Corvallis. If the sky above the mist is clear and sunny we get an extended blue hour at ground level. It can be gorgeous but the light changes fast, requiring anything from 1/8th of a second to 1/2000 from moment to moment. It is worth the effort, and worth allowing my dog to wander a bit more and further off leash than I would normally let her while I work.

Luna is a good dog, though, and I can usually trust her when the squirrels are hibernating. Do squirrels hibernate?

I'm not very practiced at this yet, but I'm working on preserving the mood and feeling I have when composing an image. The way I see it, compelling nature photography is as much about capturing a moment as is candid portraiture. If you don't catch and communicate that moment you might as well be collecting stamps, a great hobby, but not really very expressive. For me this means capturing the perfect spacial alignment of shapes and light, or a sense of dawn, or fading light, or some weather condition that informs the viewer with the context they need to sense the reason why I made the image. Why I made this image. In this case I hope to show the fleeting liminal moment.

I've been working assignment jobs under the thumb of art directors for so long that all of this feels unusual. Welcome, but unfamiliar. I'll get there, but it will take a kind of looking and listening I haven't done for a while.

If I am lucky enough to find these conditions again I will try to capture the ice shadows isolated individual trees leave in the grass. Everything is just on the edge of transition on days like this.

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nature photography landscape photography dog walk liminal space liminal moment

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