Saturday, December 15, 2018

The Saturday Snapshot #19


    
     I saw this photo and just gasped: hoarfrost on a stand of trees, taken a couple years ago by Tom Peters from Steger-Monee Road, just north of Momence.
     "I deliver flowers for a shop in Beecher so I spend a lot of time on country roads in the southland," Tom writes.

     Somehow, even the idea of flowers being delivered in rural areas jostles with our preconceptions. I'd think that the close-to-the-soil types would grow their own, or be too practical to pony up for a bouquet. But upon reflection, that can't be true. 
     What really makes this photo, in my opinion, is the use of color. The line of white trees cutting across it. The faint green of the grass, just barely pushing through the frost in the foreground. And then, off to the left, the pop of that deep, lucious, soul- renewing red, like a ruby set amidst a palmful of snow. 

5 comments:

  1. I thought the photo was pretty; now I know why.

    I went to high school in Niagara Falls, Canada, and at this time of the year, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, all the trees in the area looked to be crystallized. The photos I took of them never did them justice. Glad there are more skillful photographers with work on display here at egd.

    john

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  2. No photograph can compare with the experience of actually seeing hoarfrost on trees, or walking among them, as I have done a couple of times in the Cleveland Metroparks. Better still is rime ice, which is caused by freezing fog. Every branch and twig looks like it's covered with white fur or feathers. But rime ice is rather rare, and I've only seen it a few times in my life. Winter does have its moments of beauty. If the winter season is not always so beautiful...neither is it sheer horror.

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  3. A striking photo.

    "...the pop of that deep, luscious, soul-renewing red, like a ruby set amidst a palmful of snow:" To me the pictorial equivalent of a lovely, not elsewhere encountered, word in a favorite poem.

    "When as in silks my Julia goes
    Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows,
    the liquefaction of her clothes."

    Tom








    ,

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  4. A great photo. I've seen such things on occasion; of course, I never had a camera handy. (So, obviously, it wasn't any time recently.)

    A strange and wondrous beauty indeed.

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