Out of the Fog
A couple of mornings ago Mattie and I were doing the walk.
It's a repetitive must-do task. My sympathies are all with the dog, but after three years of going up and down the same old blocks ... it gets old.
We have been through a for-Florida very cold winter and spring has been a joy for us. And daylight savings time has given us back those sun rises again. But still, the streets are the same.
Just when I think I've gotten all the paintings I'm going to get out of doing that same walk, a new twist gets thrown in.
That morning came wrapped in a really nice fog. It's thickness increased as we walked and the sun rose. Fogs have a way of redefining the landscape. A line of trees disappears here, a street of houses becomes one mass there, foreground and background merge or separate in new ways.
It made me wish I'd brought my camera. Mattie wished I'd brought some dog biscuits. She always wishes that. She's a one-wish dog.
The road curves around stands of trees, then arcs back in another direction. In the fog the stand of trees became a vague gray-green wall and the road disappeared after the turn. I could hear some crows cawing in the tree tops.
Suddenly one of the crows swooped down out of the trees toward us. I thought it was going to land on the streetlamp just in front of us, but the bird cleared the lamp and swooshed on over us.
That little moment was hardly more than three seconds long but the fog concentrated my attention on that sweet little downward arc the bird made and the expectation I had for its destination. Still no camera. We completed our walk and headed home to breakfast.
I went back the next day with my camera, but there was no fog. I expected that. I've noticed over the years that aspects of the sun, moon or weather rarely give you a second chance. Incremental changes of rotation and orbit move the sunrises and sunsets to a different spot and time from day to day. But I had the camera so I took photos of the approximate areas I'd been the day before.
Then I went home and downloaded the images to my Mac and fired up the photoshop.
After clipping and pasting bits and pieces from several of the exposures and importing a crow from archive, I set about creating a fog. It took some effort and digital painting, but it came out pretty much as I remember the moment.
I can live with that.
