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Friday Slide Show: A Neighborhood Walk Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

26 June 2020

The other evening, the sun hadn't gone down and the fog hadn't come in. So after dinner we decided to exploit the unusually favorable summer meteorological conditions and take a stroll through cozy Rockridge Terrace up the hill a few steps.

The light, falling on the side of the hill facing the north, was beautiful. And it made everything it fell upon beautiful too. It gave everything a fullness, a volume, that the overhead sun of noon flattens into two dimensions.

So we snapped away, our shutter making the only sound in the quiet neighborhood.

WE started with the tree in front of the church that is almost all trunk. That set the tone. It's uplifted arms were painted vibrantly with the summer light.

And a few blossoms caught our eye, too. They were on fire with the last golden rays of the sun.

Fun as it was to capture them, these were not easy photos to edit.

But even in shadow, some things glowed with the light that bounced off buildings and walkways. And in the shade, flowers lifted deep color off the palette and danced.

There were even a couple of amusing compositions we couldn't pass up.

And then one final scene we loved for its combination of amber street light falling like flames on the tree beside it as the cold stone post it sat on was lit in blue shadow light.

Fun as it was to capture them, these were not easy photos to edit.

Exposure, using Aperture Priority, was easily fooled. One image a stop over, another a stop under. We opened shadows, we closed them down. We pulled back the highlights, turned up the white.

When a contrast tweak didn't quite cut it, we resorted to Dehaze even though there was no haze around.

It was a longer trip than our walk had been to get these to look like what we felt we saw.

Not what we saw. But how we responded to the scene we saw before us.

We had the feeling we'd just downed a few hot dogs off the grill, the mustard drying on our chin as we feel the tight skin of a sunburn on our arms and legs. The cool air of the evening is coming to rescue us as we look around quietly, observing nature as if it had the place to itself.

If you watch attentively in that late light of the day, you will see secrets revealed.


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