When Snow Comes

 Snowy Nandina, 2013

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We don’t get a lot of snow here in coastal Virginia. It definitely doesn’t take much to bring things to a standstill. Even the threat of snow closes schools, empties grocers’ shelves, cancel events and leads employers to tell everyone to leave early, come in late or stay at home.

I don’t remember there being much snow here when I was young. It certainly didn’t happen often, nor did it stick around long. You might get a day or two before it became slush and the disappeared altogether. We had snow sleds, but they almost never wore off their brand new shininess.

When I went off to college barely a hundred miles inland from the coast, winter was much different. There was more snow and ice and it frequently went on for days and stayed on the ground for a week or more.

Part of the reason we’ve traditionally had so little snow here along the coast is close proximity to the Gulf Stream, a river of warm water that flows northward along the Atlantic coast, warming coastal ocean waters and having a big influence on weather patterns. Forty miles inland they might get pummeled with snow, while out here by the beach we get a little snow, and often just rain instead of snow.

In recent decades, winter weather patterns have changed, as least so far as snow is concerned. We’ve have had more snowstorms, more snow accumulation and the snow has stuck around longer. Whether this is the result of climate change or some other factors doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s happening. 

Snowy Contrast, 2013

Just to prove me wrong, though, our current winter is shaping up to be an exception. There’s been the usual snow to our west, but until that past Friday afternoon there’d been nothing more than a light dusting of snow here at the coast.

In almost predictable fashion, Friday’s snowfall snarled traffic and canceled event. Schools closed early and employers sent workers home early. The bridges, tunnels and roadways were littered with accidents. Afternoon commutes that usually take minutes lasted hours.

On Saturday morning, though, all was peaceful. We’d had just a few inches of snow, enough to cover everything lightly. The dog and I went out early to take in the sights.

 

Nature's Margarita, 2013

 

Snow is a mixed blessing for photographers because cameras want to make snow look gray rather than white. Snow is great, though, for high contrast black-and-white images. So that’s what I concentrated on.

When snow comes we get out quickly with our cameras because you never know how long it might last. 

 

Hydrangea Remains, 2013

What are you jealous of?

 Give Yr Prada to the Poor, 2012

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One of the podcasts I like to listen to from time to time is Ibarionix Perello’s The Candid Frame. (How’s that for a name!) Perello just began the eighth year of producing and hosting this wonderful series of recorded interviews with well-known photographers. They talk about their work, how they got started, what inspires them and how they deal with the challenges of making a living as a photographer.

A recent guest on The Candid Frame was Vancouver-based photographer David duChemin. Back in 2010 I wrote about my admiration for duChemin and for the pdf publishing operation, Craft & Vision, he founded.

In this week’s conversation Perello asked duChemin about his recovery from a nearly fatal fall off a wall in Italy two years ago. duChemin started by outlining the expected physical limits this accident inflicted on him. (All in all, he just happy to be walking, even with a limp.)

But the recovery was also a chance for introspection and comparison of his own life with his fellow therapy patients whose prospects were not as hopeful. To start with, duChemin came away from this experience ever more determined to appreciate the opportunity that each day gives us, especially in view of his newfound appreciation of how rapidly and unexpectedly life can change.

Even more interesting was duChemin’s newfound rejection of the whole idea of competition. “I used to be jealous of a lot of photographers and I was very aggressive when it came to competitions. But now I’m not, and I don’t worry about competitions.” From that observation rolled a lengthy conversation about creating art for your own sake and for the purpose of expressing an idea rather than just to please other people.

I’ve always been jealous of any number of other photographers. I used to be jealous when even my friends whose photography I admire got recognized in some way. Eventually I realized how wasteful, counterproductive and simply unkind that was. It bothered me that I had been, however briefly, the kind of person to hold such jealousies.

Listening to duChemin talk about his jealousies at least assured me that I wasn’t alone in having such vanities and that the act of recognizing it may have actually freed me to do better work.

At This Moment

9:55 EST, 2013

I’ve written before about my fascination with the iSpy app for the iPad. It’s a wonderful pastime for armchair travelers.

iSpy’s a compendium of live cameras in hundreds of places around the world. The number of places you can learn about just by watching these live cams is amazing.

Some of the cameras are in static installations and some scan the landscape. One of the neatest features is that the iSpy user can control the view of a great many of these cameras. Sitting here in my little electronic cottage in Virginia Beach, I can control live cams in New York, Singapore, the Cayman Islands and Tasmania, just to name a few.

The one thing you become very conscious of as an iSpy user—and I know as I write that saying this will only make me sound incredibly naïve—is how daylight rolls across the planet Earth. If you have a lengthy and global list of “favorite” live cams, there are times when some of your favorite cameras will be in daylight while others are in darkness.

Duh. On an intellectual level we know and understand this. We learned it in school. We’ve looked at globes. We might have even held a flashlight or lamp beside a globe to show how the sunlight rolls across the surface of the earth as the planet turns.

Still, it’s an abstract concept because so many of us spend so much of our time in a single time zone. Unless you’re traveling across multiple longitudes, the realization that all of these things are happening simultaneously just doesn’t hit you.

Yesterday morning at 9:55 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, I found myself on hold on the telephone. While waiting to be connected, I opened my iPad and the iSpy app. I quickly saved a bunch of the live cam scenes. When I went back later to take a closer look at what I’d saved, I found a fascinating array of everyday life, including:

·   The wind blowing so hard in the harbor of Banff, Scotland, that the live cam couldn’t get a sharp image to save its life.

·   No shipping traffic on the St. Lawrence Seaway at Alexandria Bay, New York.

·   A traffic snarl at a roundabout in the Czech Republic.

·   A sunny morning in the Boston Harbor.

·   Nobody on the slopes of a ski resort in the Italian Alps.

·   A quiet border crossing in what looks like a residential neighborhood in Hungary.

·   A piece of cloth flapping in the breeze from a chimney overlooking the Bay of Naples.

·   Sailboats gliding by just outside the jetty in Tel Aviv.

·   Early commuters lined up to catch the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle.

·   Hardy souls walking along the seaside promenade in Bilthorpe, England.

·   The sun just beginning to peek over the mountains in San Ramon and Half Moon Bay, California.

All of this at the same moment, like a little snapshot of life on earth, captured while waiting for someone to answer the phone.

An Inauguration Day Memory

 

No Photo Today (Read Below)

Inaugurations are certainly one of our country’s grandest public ceremonies.  I’ve been watching them at least since Robert Frost read poetry on that snowy day in 1961 when John F. Kennedy became president.

It wasn’t until the election of Bill Clinton, though, that I felt that “we”—speaking of our generation—had stepped up to the plate.

The inauguration of 2009 was even more momentous because, though not wholly accurate, Barrack Obama was our “first black president.” (That honor’s always been bestowed, a least anecdotally, to Bill Clinton.) Those who don’t like the president don’t attach much importance to this. But the demonstration to the world that this country so historically associated with the kidnapping, transporting and enslaving of black men, women and children had elected a biracial president was pretty significant.

I looked forward to listening to President Obama’s inaugural address and arranged my work schedule to allow me time to watch the inauguration and listen to the speech.

That’s when life intervened. My mother had been in the hospital and was scheduled to be moved to a nursing home later that afternoon. But during the morning her transfer got moved up several hours. As her legal representative, I had to be present to check her into the nursing home.

As the president and his wife stepped into the Capitol to prepare for the ceremony, I left my office and rushed over to the nursing home, only to learn that my mother’s transfer had been delayed. I looked around until I found the resident lounge, a dingy room with some tired furniture and an old console television set tuned to Fox News. It was a bitter cold day. The room was cold, too, because it also served as the hallway between the resident wing and an outdoor smoking area. Every now and then I’d run down the hall to see if my mother had arrived. 

When it came time for the swearing in, I noticed that the mostly white residents who’d been in the room when I first got there had all moved along and been replaced by a crowd of mostly black nurses, aides and administrators. We waited eagerly for the chief justice and the new president to stand before the world and take the oath of office.

As if it wasn't a special enough moment, its significance really struck me when I briefly turned away from the TV screen and found that I was the only person in the room who didn’t have tears streaming down his cheeks.

As soon as the president was sworn in, the supervisors in the room hustled everyone back to their posts, leaving me to watch the inaugural address alone. 

As for my mother, it turns out she’d entered the facility through a back entrance during the swearing in ceremony and was by the time I got there safely ensconced in her new room and, not unlike our country, no worse for the transition that had just taken place.

...

To end this story, I should mention that for almost four years I carried with me on my phone a photo of that old TV set showing the president's face during his first inauguration. Whenever I looked at it I recalled the joy and the hope of the people in that room on that day. But when I went to retrieve it to use here, I discovered that I've apparently deleted the photo. So for this once, the photo you see at What I Saw will have to be the one you imagine in your own head.

A Foggy Conception

A Foggy Conception of Portsmouth, 2013

It’s a really good thing I don’t have to draw anything more than conclusions in my line of work. Still, I envy my illustrator friends and my architect friends who are so skilled at drawing buildings and the built-up environment. As the example above shows, they have nothing to worry about from me.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

While I was waiting for the fog to clear along the Norfolk waterfront last Saturday morning, it occurred to me what an unusual phenomenon fog is.

I grew up near the ocean, so fog is hardly a foreign notion to me. The sound of salt spray sizzling on power lines is a sounds that can take me back to another time and place faster than many other aural touchstones.

Fog figures big in literature and movies, too. What would Macbeth or The Third Man be without fog? Or Fellini’s Amorcord, in which the people of a small Italian village row out into a foggy bay in the middle of the night to witness the passing of a mighty ocean liner?

As I stood on the Norfolk waterfront Saturday morning watching the buildings on the opposite shore slowly emerge it occurred me that one of the attributes of fog that we don’t always think of is the way it enables us to revisualize space.

Right across the Elizabeth River from downtown Norfolk is downtown Portsmouth, Virginia. Portsmouth gets a bad rap because it’s an old city that hasn’t fared as well as its neighbors over the past fifty years. But it has a lot going for it, including some interesting and valuable architecture and commercial space that probably would have been demolished if downtown Portsmouth had been considered valuable enough to redevelop. Instead, downtown Portsmouth is home to a growing creative class retail, business and arts community. There are three good and varied museums within a block or so of each other. At the edge of downtown is a world-class collection of Colonial, Revolutionary War-era and Victorian homes, also standing because no one valued their close-to-water level neighborhood enough to knock them down and replace them with something modern.

The gist of this is that Portsmouth has a lot going for it. You just don’t hear many people talking about it. But standing on the opposite shore and not being able to see much more than fog on the Portsmouth side gives you space to wonder what Portsmouth’s waterfront might look like if given some imaginative thinking.

But you’re going to have to use your own imagination because my drawing isn’t likely to inspire anything but giggles of pity. 

In a Fog

Like Birds, 2013

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There are few things we photographer types like as much as a dynamic sky. An otherwise beautiful landscape can come across as dull if all you have to work with is an empty blue sky. We obsess over clouds. We love the puddles that follow rainstorms because they make for terrific reflections. We look forward to the high contrast and even light of snow.

I was in downtown Norfolk one morning last week for a client meeting. There was a slight fog. On my way back to the highway, I noticed a view I hadn’t noticed before. It took advantage of the trees in the foreground on the near side of the Elizabeth River and the view of a large shipyard across the river on the other side. I thought the compression of the trees in the foreground and the big Navy ships on the opposite shore would have made for an interesting picture and a good story picture describing what makes downtown Norfolk interesting. I didn’t have the right camera or lens with me, though, and I didn’t have time before my next meeting to retrieve them. So I made a mental note to return when there was fog again.

As luck would have it, this past weekend brought heavy and prolonged fog to our area. On Saturday morning I rushed back downtown, only to find that the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see the other side of the Elizabeth River. You couldn’t see the ships at the shipyard. You couldn’t’ even tell there was another city with its own tall buildings just across the way.

But I went ahead and scouted locations from which to take “the” shot when the fog thinned some. Unfortunately, I found that the only way to get the shot I wanted was to be standing in the middle of a three busy lanes of high speed traffic. No combination of lenses or different vantage points would do the job.

But I was there and the fog was there. So I made the best of the situation and took a walk along the waterfront. It was actually quite nice. The Norfolk waterfront is usually a hub of maritime activity. It’s not everyone’s thing, but I could watch it all day. You might think all there’s going to be is a continuous stream of workaday barges and tugboats toot tooting to each other. And then out of the west will come a gleaming yacht, a giant aircraft carrier, a glittering cruise ship or maybe a submarine, the bulk of its body hidden under the river. 

 

Cargo Cloaked by Fog, 2013

The fog dampens all the sound. When a tugboat passes you can’t see it or the cargo it’s pushing or pulling amid the white cloud of fog. You might detect voices. But you can’t tell where they’re coming from and all you hear for sure is the lapping of the waves against the breakwater after the vessel passes.

To be honest, when the fog’s that thick there isn’t a lot to see.  But as the sun starts to burn off some of the fog, lots of interesting things emerge. By themselves they’re not all that interesting. But as apparitions that gradually reveal themselves as the fog clears they are interesting mysteries.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda Didda

 Sons of Anarchy Virginia, 2013

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I’m always beating myself up over the pictures I didn’t take when I had the chance. Well, here’s myself another chance I almost gave myself to do it again past weekend.

I was prowling the downtown Norfolk waterfront Saturday morning. I’d gone there to shoot photos of the harbor while it was shrouded in dense fog. I got a good hour of shooting in before the sun finally started to burn off the fog.

Satisfied with my photo haul for the morning, I was on my way back to my car when I noticed this couple roll by (illegally) on the Riverwalk and stop at the landing for the Elizabeth River Ferry, a pedestrian-only vessel that carries people back and forth between the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth.

At first I didn’t pay much attention to them. The young lady dismounted and stood beside the guy. I assumed she was there to catch the ferry. Then I noticed the driver taking off his helmet, revealing the cap shown underneath. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. From a distance, though, the body language spoke of hostility.

Normally I’d have kept on walking. But then I noticed the “Sons of Anarchy Virginia” hoodie. If you’re a fan of the FX Channel’s “Sons of Anarchy” motorcycle gang soap opera, you’ll know that guys who wear the “Sons” patch aren’t to be messed with, at least in the fictional California town of Charming. (Yes, Charming.)

The further I got from the couple the more I started kicking myself for not having photographed them. I decided that I couldn’t let this moment pass and turned around. As I got close enough for them to be conscious of me, they stopped their arguing temporarily. The young man looked up at me with an expression of contempt. But I pushed on and told him I’d noticed his “Sons” hoodie and wondered if I could photograph him wearing it. The look of contempt disappeared and he was extremely polite in telling that he couldn’t be photographed. “The law, you know,” as if I’d understand.

 (Why is it I seem to be drawn to people on the lam?)

The young man did tell me, however, that I could photograph the hoodie as long as his face wasn’t visible. So I quickly jumped around behind them and took this shot. I’d like to have taken more shots from other angles. But the young lady made it clear to me that she wanted to resolve whatever argument they’d been having before the ferry arrived. I thanked them and moved on.

I didn’t really consider the young man to be much of a menace. The “real” Sons of Anarchy—you know, the ones on the fictitious TV show—ride giant Harleys rather than little Japanese rice rockets and wear leather jackets with real patches instead of hoodies that probably come from the mall.

But it seemed to be important to the young man that I know that he’s a certified badass.   “It’s a real club, you know,” he called to me as I walked away.  

Holidays on Unit 2

 Holidays on Unit 2, 2011

                                             

It’s a bleak existence riding out one’s last days in a nursing home. I’ve visited nursing homes that are like fine hotels and others I wouldn’t set foot in again.

No amount of luxury, though, can conceal the sadness of watching a loved one’s mind and body slip away. One of the things you eventually figure out if you have a loved one in a place like this is that whatever the luxury appointments, most of it’s for the benefit of family members and visitors, not the patients. My mother’s facility recently completed an extensive cosmetic overhaul. The public areas look like a country club. Not much of this renovation has reached the patient rooms yet, though.

To be honest, though, most of the patients at my mother’s nursing home can’t tell the difference. Little pieces of institutional furniture appear and disappear from my mother’s room without her being aware they were ever there in the first place. When she was briefly quarantined because of a contagious infection, she didn’t even notice that her roommate had disappeared.

My mother’s bed is beside a window. The view from her pillow is to the southeast. She gets the morning sun. She knows this is the direction of the ocean. She used to love to swim in the ocean. But it’s been five years since she saw the ocean in person.

A beautiful crepe myrtle tree is just outside her window. She used to keep track of the seasons by watching that tree. Now she’s barely aware of it.

If she were more alert, there’d be no end of things to watch out the window. Looking across the courtyard into the windows of the rooms on the next hallway over is a little like being in Rear Window. Patients, and especially family visitors, act out pantomimes that sometimes leave you wondering whether it might be wise to call security to check in on them.

But most days it’s just the routine stuff you see going on in those rooms across the way. Nurses and other caregivers attend to their often messy work with a level of cheer that constantly amazes me. They’re always busy. But every now and then you see someone who’s got every reason to feel harried take a moment to express kindness to a resident whose behavior or condition makes them a challenge to look after. My mother used to be one of the higher functioning people at her nursing home. Now it’s hard for her to communicate coherently and she’s given to outbursts that can make her a challenge to look after. I appreciate those moments of patience and kindness on the part of the staff.

There’s not a lot of conversation most days when I visit. Questions and answers get repeated a lot. If she does grasp onto a thought, she’ll keep repeating it to herself lest it slip away. She used to tell herself “Alright” when she needed a reminder that she could accomplish some small act of physical movement. Now her voluntary movement is so limited that if something’s not in her immediate sight line it isn’t in her consciousness.

All the days look pretty much the same in a nursing home. Holidays are no different. 

At Pleasure House Point

Pleasure House Point - 1, 2013

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By chance I ended up parked this past Saturday morning beside an area of Virginia Beach known as Pleasure House Point. Pleasure House Point’s local notoriety derives from it being one of the largest, if not the largest undeveloped stretch of waterfront property in the northern part of Virginia Beach, a city that is not so jokingly said to have never seen a waterfront developer it didn’t like.

Pleasure House Point is a 118-acre tract of raw land, maritime woods, marsh and tidal estuary just inside Lynnhaven Inlet, a narrow opening at the southernmost end of the Chesapeake Bay that twice a day replenishes the Lynnhaven River and a series of inland bays. Once upon a time relatives of the Algonquin Indians, I believe it was, lived at Pleasure House Point. Captain John Smith and a boatload of his Virginia Company compatriots explored the area in 1607, where they found “oysters a big as dinner plates.”

But like much of the City of Virginia Beach, in modern times Pleasure House Point came to be owned by a real estate developer who planned to clear the property and build waterfront condominiums. For reasons I’ve forgotten, he sold the property to other developers, who subsequently lost it to the bank at the outset of our most recent economic recession. The City, with foundation and other local support, was able to acquire the property to protect it from future development. Local environmentalists intend to use Pleasure House Point as a living classroom. 

 

Pleasure House Point - 27, 2013

But for now the area’s as untouched, relatively speaking, as when Indians hunted in its woods and fished in its waters. Ancient stands of lives oaks cling close to the earth in order to survive heavy coastal winds. Oysters and blue crabs abound in its creeks. It’s a little rough in places, but an amazingly pristine place given the densely developed area that abuts it.

I didn’t go to Pleasure House Point with any specific photographic expectations. To be honest, because I live on the Lynnhaven River I’ve taken a lot of pictures of marshes and water. I wasn’t anxious to add to that clichéd collection. So instead I turned my camera to the Southern sky, which happened to be particularly lively with jagged jet contrails on Saturday.

Given that I covered no more than a dozen so acres on Saturday at Pleasure House Point, there’s a lot left to explore in the future.

 (And yes, I really do have to get serious about using a neutral density filter.)

 

The House as an Island

  The House as an Island - 1, 2012

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I’ve always been fascinated by houses that tell us by their appearance that their occupants have no interest in the landscape around them.

I don’t think it’s a sign of moral deficiency to not have a lovingly landscaped yard. I get it that maintaining a yard can be laborious and that the investment required to do so can rank far down the list of many people’s priorities.

Still, I come from people who, when they had a chance to acquire their own little suburban patches, were quick to announce their arrival in the lower middle class with a decent stand of turf grass and a few azaleas. If any two of my Bonney ancestors were together their conversation would at some point include at least some talk about fertilizer and the proper time to prune hydrangeas. I know that when the first Bonney man acquired a riding mower he was thought to be putting on airs and only later quietly envied.

In the big scheme of things residential lawns and gardens are, like domestic dogs and cats, a relatively modern concept. In historic times land and livestock had working roles. A turf grass lawn was showy, a sign that the homeowner was well enough off to be able to afford to plant, irrigate and maintain a stretch of lawn or floral garden for no other purpose that to be looked at.

Growing affluence following the great wars and programs like the VA and FHA mortgages gave more people a crack at the suburban single-family home dream. (Only in very recent times has the assumption that home ownership is the best path to civic and financial stability been questioned.)

By and large, homeowners tend to be very proud of their homes. They personalize their abodes and dot their lawns with trees and shrubs. Most people say they’d like to live in neighborhoods with tree-lined streets. Even the cheapest of developers have traditionally thrown in a few foundation shrubs to soften the borders between street, lawn and house. In many places, it’s actually required before a mortgage will be issued.

It always surprises me, though, to come upon a residence completely surrounded by vegetation no taller than a blade of grass. I see it more in rural rather than suburban areas. There’s a old nondescript clapboard house along Rt. 13 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia that I’ve longed to photograph because it looks no more acclimated to its site right beside the busy highway than if a tornado had just now plopped it down there.

 

The House as an Island - 2, 2012

I’ve been thinking about doing a photo series of the kinds of houses I’m talking about.  The house shown above was noticed along the road south of Tappahannock, Virginia. By rural standards it’s a pretty substantial structure. These pictures don’t do justice to the way the house sits all by itself on a slight rise above the highway. Still, you can see by the almost total lack of attention to its physical surroundings that its residents see this house as a purely indoor refuge, an island by itself.