Sunday Morning Walk
Our trip to Ireland and visit in Didam with our friends Judy and John was great. As usual, I’m agonizing over whether the photographs I made during the trip (it wasn’t a photography trip at all) are any good and thinking of how best to tell that story. Because with John, pretty much everything is a story.
We dropped them off at Schiphol airport on Friday, took care of business at home that afternoon and yesterday and this morning decided to go for our usual walk. It really didn’t turn out that way because we both grabbed cameras and our usual one-hour walk extended into over two hours. Instead of sight seeing, it became a photography walk. Here are some of the images I made along the way. Hopefully, they tide you over until I get to the trip stories.
It didn’t take me long before I decided to pull out the camera and see how slow of a shutter speed I could get down to and still have a reasonably sharp image. I think it says more about modern in-camera image stabilization than my skills when I say, pretty darned slow.
There was a low hanging mist and light cloudy skies, so I suspected that it was going to be a decent morning to photograph.
We decided to make a counter clockwise loop this time, which ran us along the lake at the early part of the loop. Given how nice the light was turning, we veered off the path to get some better framing, much to the annoyance of the ducks along the shore.
The light was ethereal, with the morning glow varying in intensity with the ebb and flow of the mist and the color hanging around a lot longer than I’d expected. Even fairly mundane buildings had a mystery to them in the mist.
he morning quickly turned into a time to play with the camera, something we really didn’t do much of during the trip. It was nice just taking our time, thinking of something and making a photograph as much to find out what it would look like as to try and make a great photograph.
So we wandered along our path, appreciating how different everything looked under the conditions and wondering if we aren’t seeing the first hints of the fall color change.
And as the sun started to rise, the skies turned more pale in color. But the mist lingered, fighting back against the sun to hug the ground, adding continued mystery to our photographs.
Along the path we were frequently surrounded by corn stalks. It’s animal feed corn, unfortunately, and well past its prime at this point. We’d expected it to have been harvested by now (they started last week with some of the fields), but the changing colors in the leaves made for some interesting subjects so I stopped to take advantage of them while they are still around.
And given the mist and sunlight of the morning, I couldn’t resist stopping at the footpath I photographed last year.
As I said, we were out there a couple of hours and we went from darkness to light. It was lovely seeing the landscape in such beautiful light, given we’re usually walking these rounds in early morning darkness.
And did I say corn? Yeah, I probably made too many images of corn.
But when you’re walking through a tunnel of corn with stalks above your head on both sides and beautiful morning light streaming down the path, it’s hard not to pull out your camera and try to take advantage of it.
And that we did, because as the sun rose over the horizon, it became much more brilliant in its intensity. Of course, that revealed a range of new images to be made.
In some ways, it wasn’t much. Just a morning walk on a lovely day.
But it was refreshing, having a camera with me and taking my time to enjoy it all. Seeing the familiar in new light and being able to photograph it is a privilege and a luxury. I’m glad we took the time to enjoy it.