Picture Story
A look behind the curtain at my work
"Fire and Ice"
Perfection doesn't last long
It was over in ten minutes.
The purple shadows, the grey clouds and orange sky reflecting on the crystal-white ice.
Gone.
Quickly.
Remaining only was a lingering irony in the fact that capturing this quickly vanishing landscape painted before me was a privilege earned by careful planning the day before.
Oh.. right. There is another reward, one a lot less fleeting: a new image released to my website (www.ejschweit.com), “Fire and Ice.”
But back to the landscape and the day before.
I had checked the forecast: partly cloudy. A good thing.
Checked the temps: lower 30s. Also a good thing.
Checked the winds: single digits, no windchill. Another good thing.
The locale: know it like the back of my hand, even in the dark of early morning. A very good thing.
I'd worked the shoreline at Independence Grove before, going back to the pandemic and 2020, in good weather and bad. In spring and in fall. Winter, too.
As recently as last week, I had walked the freshly fallen snows, in search of a composition in the steely gray, overcast morning, only to leave frustrated.
So on this day, I knew just where to set up. I needed only the conditions to be perfect. And they were. Briefly.
A fog followed; not physically in the natural world before me, but in my consciousness. For those minutes, all distractions ceased, all brain chattered stopped, awareness of the cold vanished.
Ten minutes and maybe a dozen frames later it, it all changed.
The rising sun had burned off orange clouds, turning the skies blue with streaks of soft white clouds.
Grasses along the shoreline turned yellow and the ice brightened to reveal undulating patterns across the surface.
The landscape that I had spent a few brief minutes photographing was gone.
Quickly,leaving only the image and a pleasant memory. And a new image, “Fire and Ice.”
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“One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It’s a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn’t’ knocking you around, life isn’t controlling you. You have picked your place, you’ve picked your scene, you’ve picked your light, you’ve done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you….”
-Sam Abell
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