Winter Light

The light was shining through a small breech in the clouds behind me this morning, turning the bare branches almost white in contrast to the black clouds behind them.

A woman pushing a wheelchair with a very old lady in it stopped to ask me what I was doing. A man ran by pushing an empty wheelchair. OilMan and I speculate frequently about why he does this, as we see him often, but have come to no satisfactory conclusion.

We branched off the main path and climbed up a small trail leading to a second lake called Ralphine. It seems to be where the ducks, swans and geese disappear to in the winter. A sign warnes us that they will bite, but if we wish to feed them we should give them grain or vegetables, not bread. It reminded me of taking my own children, armed with large bags of bread crumbs, to Lake Merritt in Oakland and Blackford Pond in Edinburgh. It was difficult to explain to the grandchildren why we couldn't feed the large bags of bread we had brought with us to Lake Ralphine for the express purpose of feeding the ducks….

We got home before the rain started and I thought I would practice shutter speeds on the birds flying around the feeders, but I was defeated by the cold and the rapidly darkening skies….no doubt why I will never be a great photographer. 

Galen Rowell, a mountaineer/photographer from Berkeley, took a famous picture of a rainbow ending at the Potala Palace in Lhasa,Tibet. The picture and his wonderful story of how he got it are in his book, Mountain Light: in Search of the Dynamic Landscape published  by Sierra Club Books in 1986.  II have put a picture of his photo in the extras. It's a great book for photographers, even though the photos were taken before the advent of the DSLR camera.

Galen and I used to see each other running in the Berkeley hills. He and his wife were killed when their small plane crashed in the Eastern Sierra in 2002…a terrible loss to climbers, mountain lovers and photographers alike

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.
-Galen Rowell