This may be a lesson in patience:
The sounds of the outside world rarely penetrate to the hills above and below Straight Farm, and usually the only evident inhabitants are the birds and deer. It's joy just to be here, but for me it continues to seem an apparently endless source of new photographic ideas. In spite of this, I've found the large forms of the main barns difficult to shoot. Instead, my camera picks at the details or shoots the fields, trees, and outbuildings. Of photos published on TODAY'S, only two show anything of the silo.
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-i-never-shoot-sky.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2007/05/freuhlingslied.html
On Sunday we spent part of our Colors Marathon here, and I saw that the fields were freshly mowed. I decided then that I would get back at first opportunity to walk down through the field east of the farmstead to the southern edge of the property where it meets Hollow Swamp. More on that in a subsequent post.
On my way back I climbed up along the eastern edge of the field, not crossing back to the farmstead until I could see the barns end view, and I approached it dead on. What a surprise to come on this old friend from such a new angle!
Here finally was a whole face of the barn that would yield itself up to my lens without asking for compromises. At last a true place for the vines and the one, mute window whose expressive ring had always appealed to me! And the silo's patina, not yet weather-scrubbed on the northeastern side! I'd used the bank on which the farmstead sits as a platform to get angle above the fields; I'd never seen it as a carpeted apron textured in fallen leaves to anchor the image. Even the orange tree which had turned a brilliant orange but only in isolated patches that made it more weird than photographically useful... even that tree turns in a bravura performance doing exactly what is needed.
It's not that I haven't tried. Perhaps the picture isn't ready to happen until the picture is ready to happen, and the gift is being there at the right time and place to find it. Or perhaps others would have spotted it early on and had a hundred good shots by now.
