There’s but to dream of early spring.
Or in this case, the fungus among us.
Typical to autumn, what light manages to reach the forest
floor ranges from stark…
…to downright dingy.
Not infrequently at the same time, in a single frame.
That’s a once supremely daunting photographic challenge digital
capture today renders all but moot. We do indeed live in an age of imaging
wonder.
Though otherwise productive, this past season the real
challenge proved to be finding suitable fungi to shoot. I'm guessing drought took its
toll.
Right at the end, after a long spate of coolish temps and
adequate rainfall, the fungal season turned propitious.
All the land-looking it took to finally find some was a
happy bonus.
In any event, autumn’s splendor is retreated now and the oak
savanna is grey.
Winter’s crept in.
Tallgrass bows beneath its weight.
Considerably later, as it turns out.
With spates of unseasonable warmth and adequate moisture well into November, early autumn
richness proved resilient.
What might’ve been cold hard work searching brown barrens
for splashes of living color, wasn’t that.
As ever, the season’s luxurious long light bore sublime gifts.
It was such a lengthy autumn that even fungi finally cooperated, in the end being fresh out of excuses.
Inevitably, the real world did turn. That’s about as
dependable a thing as we have.
Some folk equate autumn with dying. But on prairie sprinkled with oak savanna, even the most pallid
light reveals a promise of renewal.
Next stop, winter solstice. After which daylight creeps steadily
back into winter's world and old promise is given new life come spring.
Depend on it.
Weeks of premature chill and periodic rain followed by a spate of highly unusual warm, dry weather rendered this year’s autumnal prairie rich.
Will those conditions be seen as ass backwards for long? Perhaps
not. We’ll see.
But especially given its miserable beginnings, this fall showed
real well for itself.
I’d mentioned how when I bought the Linhof I considered shooting botanicals, then opted instead for architectural work.
Never expected to come back ‘round to the lives of plants
and their great diversity of inhabitors, but here we are.
Undoubtedly, my current botanical work benefits from all
those years considering the organic geometry of wilderness slowly eating failed
construct.
The real world creating and later recycling is pretty much all the same thing, whether coming or going. Doesn’t much matter whether earth made it, or
we did.
Either way, chaos can seem readily apparent.
A worthy subject, chaos. Especially when you look closer and find that what seems chaotic isn’t, exactly.
As the season progressed, light life and diverse opportunity
continually presented.
As I write this, it's a full 16 degrees above 'normal' outside. South winds howl. The sky is suspicious grey. Tomorrow it'll all crash, they say.
But not yet today.
Human construct fails.
All human construct fails, with time.
I’ve mentioned how a coworker at a photo lab, knowing I
intended to do fieldwork, advised me against cherrywood view cameras, despite
those being the most romantically elegant version of the tool I most needed.
“Wood warps,” he said. “All wood warps, in time.
Construct fails. All construct fails, with time.
Even verities once deemed everlasting.
But 'built to last' is undeniably better, for so long as that
lasts.
So when push came to shove, I went with Linhoff’s durability.
That tool now rests in its handy travel bag. In theory, it’ll outlast me.
Can't tell how many times I've tried to duplicate the image
below, using better film and/or digital capture. In all the years of looking
and waiting and shooting never quite this, I've not glimpsed such a telling
composition again…
Sometimes, happy happenstance really is everything.
By spending so much quality time in Superior places working the
Nikon, my vision through the proscenium lens continued to improve.
They say history repeats itself.
I soon enough wearied of repeating mine.
Decided that being an opportunistic, snapshot taking
dilettante into old age just wasn’t gonna cut it. What I was seeing demanded so
much more.
Upon buying it, I only sorta kinda knew a Linhoff nearly as
old as I was might also be a magic window on the world.
During my first trip into the wilderness with it, I came
home with this, because it’s what I saw.
And that winter, I reconsidered
botanicals.
Except the next season, I came home the likes of this:
And a decade’s long pursuit was met.
Magic window indeed.
Through most of my photographic life, I've struggled to see through the high summer season's obscurity of abundance.
Superior wilderness or oak savannah and prairie alike, green
is green. Ubiquitous green is all but blinding, at least first glance.
As a kid, I knew to look close at the natural world. To see what most children didn't search for.
Probably what I appreciate best about digital capture is
that it's got me seeing small again.
Generous low light tolerance helps a lot.
Plus, harsh summer light no longer being an inevitable destroyer
of high contrast images is an absolute joy.
The periodic deluges of early summer continued well into July.
I was particularly pleased to find splashes of fresh fungi along
the forest floor. Previously, that'd been absent.
Then the rains ended.
By mid-August, local life was somewhat worse for
wear. What does one call a swallowtail with no tails left?
The landscape remains 'abnormally dry.' Or is that a new normal?
I don't know. A few years running much like this, at any rate.
But as the rich season ends, most things are about as they should be.
Prairie and oak savannah are remarkably resilient.
This was the summer I relearned to see beyond all the green.
Yesterday, the first autumnal cold front swept through. That blasted away a spell of unseasonable heat.
Now we wing our way fast toward fall.