The Real Sky Was Better

Tonight's sunset: the inky trees were crosshatched over the blue and rosy stripes of clouds. I like the tangled nest of lines gathered at the lower right, with the last pastel light peeping through. It was well worth braving the icy air to go for a walk earlier in the day. Later on, coming home with groceries, I drove beneath these gorgeous colors. I grabbed my camera to try to capture the fading sunset from my neighbor's driveway. The real sky was so much better, unwilling to live inside my camera.

I wish you all a creative and colorful 2010!

To enlarge the image, click on the photo.

Looking

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
-- Brooks Atkinson

And, I find, while looking through the extra eye of the camera, that I flinch with sweet shock at the other worlds revealed. I take delight in that deep focus, that revelation, that unfurling.

Follow the advice of Goethe:

Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.
-- Goethe

Both quotes came from The Harper Book of Quotations, edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, HarperPerennial, 1993, pages 345 and 344 respectively. The photo of the fern was taken last spring at The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY.