Evening light at Indian Point.

 Somehow I usually find myself at this familiar place in the morning, but this cool winter afternoon is sunny for a change, so I grab my camera and head for the Point. That place I found the other day up in the mist must be quite different in the slanting, late afternoon lighting. Photography at first must seem about subject matter but as time goes along, for me, it is increasingly about the light. That is how I can come back to the same place, the same subjects, and never repeat a photograph because light changes andit is my increasing sensitivity to the nuances of light that keeps me learning and hopefully improving in my photography. One must open more and more to the subtleties of things.

Sure enough I find an embarrassment of subjects. Side lighting creates three-dimensional rocky outcrops and the backlighting of mossy trees and boulder-fields or rotting logs is spectacular, - all the images in my viewfinder line themselves up in compositions that celebrate the brilliant shafts of evening light. I will find later in the computer`s ’Lightroom 3’ program that many of these dramatically lit images will become effective B&W versions as well. Freed of colour and its sometimes contradictory messaging, they express this place in all its form, value and textural complexity so very well.