Tricks and Treats of Light

It’s tricky out there.

I took all these photos years ago, always looking for the way light alters what I see.

A viewer may recognize a foreground flower, and therefore be able to approximate the season in which it appears in my corner of the world. But only I know what makes up the background, and therefore the story of a given moment.

Is that a polished slab of stone in the background, high noon light glinting off mirrored granite particles? A nubbled glass window pane? A fountain, or perhaps a body of water? Is that flower still growing, or part of a bouquet? In my sight or in my hand? Am I zooming in, or can I breathe in its scent when I preserve the image?

All photos are a form of trickery, not least in stilling and preserving a fraction in time. This one brings me back to surrounding flowering beach plum, with this lone exuberant bud phototropically reaching for heaven on a hot summer day. It drew my attention not only because of its elegant extension, but also the glittering silver bokeh provided by Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s Mill Pond.

I love a little bit of mystery–some might even call it trickery–in a shot. Ephemeral colors and shapes which were never truly there. Blazing neon fleetingly painting itself upon sand and water and sky. Cotton candy and raspberry cloud berets touching down on bare winter branches at sunset. A stormfront cleaving and seeping through glowing daylight. A traffic light that becomes a perigee moon and transforms a penguin ice sculpture into molten gold.

And what do you suppose was happening here?

I welcome your guesses below….