Tag Archives: ides of march

March is Here Again

Posted by enmanscamera on
The train goes by

Notch Hill Church

 

From winter's storm

Lost during winter’s storm

 

Lakeshore in spring

Desolate beach

 

Just before spring

Waiting for planting season

 

ReConstruction

Reconstruction

 

Winter tree in spring

Winter tree waiting for spring

 

Yes, March is here again. Those who have been reading my posts for a while know that I approach this month with a foreboding feeling. The optimism of January and the hopefulness of February have now passed.

Last year I wrote about the uninspiring landscape of this month and the frustration of photographers who are ready for something other than falling snow and icy roads. I quipped about useless forays into the countryside to photograph hungry coyotes, wandering deer, or sad little birds that hung about through the winter.

However, just when I was ready to be moody and join others gloomily complaining about the weather, Mother Nature has thrown a wrench in the spokes with spring-like weather.

I traditionally expect March to come “In like a lion and out like a lamb”, but not so this year. February 2015 is being heralded as the second warmest ever recorded here in British Columbia. What is a guy to do? I wasn’t ready for spring.

The landscape is mostly snow-less, but I know there is green growth beneath that drab, lifeless end of winter brown. So with that in mind, my wife, Linda, and I decided in spite of that lingering pale hue that we would pack our cameras and take a drive along the ice free Thompson River to see if we could find something worth pointing our cameras at.

I had decided to mount my trusty 18-200mm lens on my camera. I like that easy to use lens. It may not be the sharpest lens in many collections, but it is versatile, lightweight, and doesn’t take up much room. Besides that I can always tweak its slight lack of sharpness in Photoshop.

As we drove up the river valley I wondered if I would find anything in the lifeless landscape to photograph. We are so conditioned to search for colour when we set out to do scenics that we forget to look at the structure as the scene unfolds in front of us.

We talked and drove without finding anything to photograph and eventually stopped for lunch in the small lakeside town of Sorrento. I just couldn’t get motivated and after that big meal was about to resign myself to just returning home to sleep it off. But as I paid for our lunch, Linda talked to some local people who suggested we check out the old church at Notch Hill. I was surprised when they said that decrepit 1920s church was still there. Well, it was just barely there, and under some slow restoration.

As I selected different angles to photograph that decaying building I realized I should be photographing its transition in the landscape. I was seeing things wrong and falling prey to words of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar who said, “beware of the ides of March”. It’s what is changing and emerging that I should capture, not try to photograph the bloom of spring when it isn’t here yet.

I began to look for the story that happens between one season and the next, the shoulder season. I realized my photographic goal should be to select subjects that visually talk about that moment just after winter and just before spring.

I am sure one could still wander up into the mountains and continue photographing winter or search for some hot location in the city with early growth. But for those that are always creating photography challenges for themselves, I suggest that as with that old Notch Hill church, this year’s March photography challenge should be about something between the seasons.

I look forward to your comments. Thanks, John

My website is at www.enmanscamera.com

The ides of March

Posted by enmanscamera on

I have never been very positive about March. It is a transition period, or month for that matter, and we are now in the middle, well in “the ides of March”, and I suppose I am not that good waiting for change. I would like to go out and search for some subject that demands to be photographed, but I can’t rouse any creativity as I stand staring out the window at the melting snow.  Charles Dickens in “Great Expectations” aptly described my feeling when he wrote, “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” This foreboding for March began when as a child I read “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. I do remember that until my teacher made us delve into the imagery of the novel, line by line, I had just enjoyed it as another adventure story. “Beware of the ides of March,” said the soothsayer, and poor ole Captain Ahab gets himself pinned to a whale and dies in the end. Even at that young age I wondered, why March? Then to my dismay came the same words when I read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and there is was again, he was told to beware of the ides of March. Today I know that the “ides of March” is just a way of saying March 15 in Roman times, but I have been frustrated by March for a long time, and I want it to be over soon because I hate waiting for the unknown.  To make things worse there is, “In like a lion and out like a lamb.” Does it never end, these disturbing warnings of March? I just want to wander around in a photogenic landscape taking pictures. I don’t care if there is lots of snow, or lots of grass; I just want one or the other. Last week I was hired to do a staff photograph by a local organization. Gazing from the office window I saw a large lawn, but as I turned to the woman organizing things she said sadly, “ It looks really nice, but it’ll be too cold for people at ten in the morning, and it’ll be muddy. We’ll have to move things around and use the cafeteria”. I knew that would mean the 22 people, my lighting, and I would be jammed tight in that space, and I’d be spending time after the photo session “PhotoShopping” stuff out. With a snow-covered lawn I’d have made them bundle up, or on a wet spring day they could have worn raincoats, and I would have photographed them under either of those conditions with success. I just shook my head and thought about poor Caesar and poor Ahab. March doesn’t work for me either. I like the topography created by snow and I like trudging through it with my camera and I always find something to photograph. Spring works for me also, I don’t mind rain and mud is just a minor irritant and I like nothing more then photographing fog moving across a rain soaked ridge. Yet March doesn’t give much, it just makes one wait. The host of the British public television program “Making Things Grow,” Thalassa Cruso, once quipped, “March is a month of considerable frustration – it is so near spring, and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away.”
 And prolific writer Ogden Nash said “Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes, the wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.” March, in my opinion, is not a month that photographers embrace. Well, maybe a foray or two to photograph some hungry coyote, or deer, wandering the countryside, and some birds that hung about through the winter are seen looking for any morsels they can find, but even for those subjects one has to hunt in an uninspiring landscape. I suppose we could put our heads down and get up earlier because of the time change (one more problem with this month), in anticipation of a better season and friendlier months, and just march onward, awaiting a time to do photography again.

www.enmanscamera.com.