Shining Light on the Prairie - Autumn, later

 

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.

Shining Light on the Prairie - Autumn, earlier

 

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.

 

35mm Artifacts – Construct, at Last

 

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.

 

Shining Light on the Prairie - Summer, Part 2

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.

 

Shining Light on the Prairie – Summer, Part 1

Our chill and desperately dry spring hung tough well into June.

Happily, native prairie life has about 10,000 years of learning how to deal with even unusual duress.

We reached extreme levels of drought. Growth was appropriately sparce. Pollinator populations appeared anything but robust.

Despite knowing full well how resilient this landscape is and though we'd purposefully nurtured ours to meet the challenge, I worried. Because that's what humans do.

Then during late June into July, intermittent deluges came.

Occasionally, things took a damned near biblical turn. Like the eight inches of rain that pummeled the land over the course of a single day.

That's not optimal. No prairie can suck all that water up so fast. Most of the precious elixir just washed straight away. All along, we stayed perversely dry.

Then life burst upon the prairie much the same as ever. A day late maybe…

…but hardly a dollar short.

And suddenly, as if by magic, the summer season turned typically lush and all the usual suspects settled in to feast.

It ended up being a banner year for local monarchs. As many as seven at a time, some days. Possibly, I've not seen so many in one place for decades.

Not saying the monarch's 'saved' or anything like it, anecdotal evidence too often isn't worth the paper it's no longer printed on. But perhaps the swamp milkweed I introduced last summer had something to do with that.

Who can say for sure, save the monarch?

Come August, the green obscurity of abundance settled in.

Rummaging through the understory, I even found some fungus. First of the year.

After that, the summer season just seemed to fly.