Out In The Cold - PTAS

Today’s Picture Tells A Story finds me back in frigid Maine, where the temperature as I’m writing this is -1F. It’s a far cry from Florida’s colorful warmth, or the unseasonably high of 55F that greeted me when I got off the plane in Portland last weekend. 

There’s a stark beauty to winter in northern latitudes. Even traces of color, from evergreens, winter berries, and moss, become vibrant in their isolation. They stand out against the snow, where they’d be lost amidst the spring foliage and greenery. On a day of brutal cold such as this, the air is crystal clear, too cold to hold any moisture, and the icy blue of the sky seems to go on into infinity. 

It is profoundly quiet as well. The fallen snow deadens sound, though not as dramatically as when it’s falling, and there are no leaves to rustle or sticks to snap as I make my way through the undergrowth to where this photo was taken. Moreover, with the air bitingly cold, and the wind chill well into dangerously low digits, I am alone in the park as far as I can tell.

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Sony A7iii w/ Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 DG DN Art
ISO100, 1/200, f10, @14mm
Processed in Capture One Pro 20 & Adobe Photoshop 2020

There’s a deeply rewarding sense of satisfaction at taking on the power of winter and being comfortable doing so. I’ve planned extensively for this outing, wearing four layers of clothing, stout insulated boots, heavy mittens, and carrying two electric hand warmers. Even so, I have to pace myself carefully, almost meditatively, to avoid an asthma attack, which can be triggered by both cold and exertion in my case. 

Amidst the peace and quiet of the snowy park, I’m also imminently aware of the fact that a moment’s carelessness could get me injured or killed in any number of ways. 

A slip into the waterfall or river that brought me out here to Shaw Park/Gambo Preserve could send me into shock remarkably fast, not to mention wreaking havoc on the thousands of dollars worth of camera gear strapped about my person. An ankle caught in the hidden rocks and fallen trees beneath the snow could cause a break or sprain that would make getting back to the car next to impossible, an especially dire risk in an area with poor cell reception. Behaviors I’d think nothing of in warm weather, such as stepping into a rushing stream, or kneeling on wet ground to get a better angle for a photo, risks tipping the delicate balance of protective layers between me and the dangerous air. 

Despite all of this, I know that my winter is a kitten compared to white tiger people in other areas experience. An excursion into a 12F day, even with high winds, may feel to someone on the North Dakota oil fields not unlike the weirdly balmy 55F weather that we had here last week. 

The sense of pride and relief I feel returning from taking pictures is almost primal in nature. Not only did I go out into a world where the very air was ready to kill me, but thanks to good planning, I did so in relative comfort.

It’s at once a powerful and absurd little victory, to face the elements and come through intact, but today, I’ll take it.

A Truck That's Aimin' High - PTAS

"Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck,
but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."

- Lyrics from "Fire in the Sky" by Kristoph Klover

Today's photo is of course, not of Columbia, which was lost during re-entry, along with her crew of seven, but rather of her younger sister, Atlantis. Retired along with the rest of the surviving space shuttles, Atlantis today rests on a plinth inside a purpose-built exhibition hall at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where I took this photo.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, the Space Transportation System (STS), better known as the Space Shuttle, was the lens through which space exploration was viewed in my formative years. Though lacking the earth-shattering newness of Apollo, the shuttles still provided plenty to be excited for. They were critical to building the International Space Station, humanity's lone outpost beyond our home world's atmosphere, as well as delivering (and servicing) the Hubble Space Telescope and other critical pieces of orbital infrastructure that have helped define our world, and shape our understanding of our place in the universe.

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Sony A7iii w/Sony 24mm f1.4 GM | ISO640, 1/60, f1.6 | Processed in Capture One Pro 12

Despite two extremely high profile, utterly avoidable, fatal disasters, Challenger in January 1986 and the aforementioned Columbia in February of 2003, on a simple miles-traveled-per-fatality basis, no class of vehicle has ever been safer. That said, the STS program never lived up to its promises, and the retirement of the shuttles was an understandable decision.

Visiting Kennedy wasn't the end of my space-oriented day though. That evening, my father and I watched from his back porch in Poiciana, FL as SpaceX's Starlink 2 mission roared into the heavens atop a Falcon 9 rocket that was launching for its fourth time. It was the first time I ever witnessed a rocket launch in person, and even from just over fifty miles away (as the crow flies) it was an incredible sight.

If the shuttle was the defining space vehicle of my childhood, the Falcon has become that of my adulthood. With their stunning live streams, elegant vertical landings, and the kind of launch tempo that the STS program envisioned by achieved, it's hard not to be inspired by what SpaceX, and to a lesser extent their competitors in Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, have accomplished.

Yet, even among the excitement, the fact that space flight is being driven today by corporations rather than the government leaves me conflicted. I am not the biggest fan of our government, and even I know that NASA's scientific and exploratory mission was always paired with advancing the development of military technology. At the same time, nothing I've seen in the last twenty years has led me to be overly trusting of private industry either. Whether by malice, incompetence, or both, modern technology companies have shown themselves to have no compunctions around screwing over their customers in nearly uncountable ways.

The SpaceX mission dad and I watched launch is a great example of my conflicted feelings.

SpaceX's Starlink project aims to create a global network of high-speed, low-latency, satellites capable of providing internet service anywhere on earth. In the process, they will more than double the total number of objects in low earth orbit, and there are already concerns that Starlink satellites could disrupt astronomical observations and the tracking of potentially earth-impacting asteroids. Though SpaceX is taking a variety of steps to try and ameliorate those issues.

Beyond those concerns, one corporation controlling a global internet network would wield an incredible amount of power. In a world without anything resembling global net neutrality, they could shape everything from politics, to health, to people's fundamental understanding of the world and their place in it. This is especially true in parts of the world where today there is no internet access at all.

But then I look at Kashmir in India, where the government shut down all internet access, as part of their ongoing legal and societal oppression of that country's Muslim minority. Starlink couldn't be shut down by any one government or entity, unless they could convince Starlink's owners (presumably SpaceX) to do so. Additionally, as someone privileged to have reliable internet most places I go, it's arrogant as hell for me to now say that a project to bring access to such an incredible and life-changing resource, might not be a good idea.

When I was a kid watching on TV as Space Shuttles roared into space, my feelings of wonder were untainted by such nuanced concerns, and that gives me a certain nostalgia for the lovely Atlantis. But nostalgia is inherently a thing oriented to the past, and when it comes to human endeavors in space, there's plenty of excitement, albeit with a healthy dose of trepidation, on the horizon.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of using Klover's lyrics, with their reference Columbia's first flight, for a post featuring a picture of Atlantis. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board determined that given the chance, Atlantis could have rescued the Columbia's crew, had NASA been willing to acknowledge that Columbia's launch went awry, and devoted her mission to investigating the extent of the damage.

2019's Long Night - Solstice in Three Photos

It occurs to me as I sit down to write up my 2019 Long Night journey, that I haven’t written anything substantive in over ten months, not since I wrote my mom’s eulogy. For that matter, I also have done little scenic or landscape photography in that same time. The idea of taking those kinds of photos without being able to share them with mom has simply been too painful. 

In a year that has, for many reasons, including losing my mother, felt like a year-long slog through an unending Long Night, I set out into my Solstice vigil low on sleep and high on anxiety, but determined to honor the turning of the year.

Sunset

Over a year since moving away from Old Orchard Beach, it’s on that familiar stretch of sand that I find myself saying goodbye to the waning sun. The popular resort town becomes a shadow of its summer-self by this time of year. The amusement park looms skeletal over the pier area, where all but a few businesses are shuttered. In the winter, it’s occasionally possible to stand on the beach and not see another soul. 

I have the beach to myself on this grey, chill, solstice eve. Just when I had resigned myself to relying on my watch to tell me when the sun officially set though, a brief break in the clouds graces me with a last glimpse of light before the Long Night sets its teeth into the world.

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Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm f2.8 @21mm
ISO 2500 1/125 f7.1
Processed in Capture One

Deep of the Night

In a similar vein to my 2018 deep of the night photo, my 2019 clever conceptual photo plan proves untenable. This year I go through with executing the photos, at no small inconvenience and discomfort, but the results are dismal. 

However, I find myself oddly relieved. The idea that failed was a revisit of a successful mid vigil shot from a few years ago, with only minor variation. Moreover, it took (kept?) my solstice journey in an emotionally dark place.  As much as it makes sense, it’s not the energy I want to carry into the waxing year. 

Looking for something more joyous and whimsical, I bundle up and trudge down the road. In the bitter cold and inky darkness, with a silly grin on my face, I spend some time getting a photo that my husband has been asking for for weeks. Our neighbors about a half mile away have decked one of their dump trucks in lights, with Santa in the cab behind the iced over windows. It’s just so ridiculous and fun, a perfect bit of levity in the depths of the Long Night.

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Sony A7iii w/Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 @75mm
ISO 160 3.2 seconds f8
Processed in Capture One

Sunrise

For the dawn of the waxing year, I find myself at a spot I’ve considered each year for sunrise at the end of my solstice vigil, but never actually visited. I’m relieved at how easy it is to get to, and the view down the Saco River is beautiful as the approaching sun begins setting the scattered clouds ablaze. My spot is perfectly positioned for the rising sun, something that is more difficult to find on the Maine coast than one might imagine.

I’m in position a solid half hour before the sun is scheduled to break the horizon, and shoot dozens of photos as the dawn paints the sky in blues, purples, and finally, yellows as the day begins to break. After each shot, I tuck my hands quickly into my pockets, thawing them with the rechargeable electric hand-warmer I have stashed there. 

When the sun is well and truly hung in the sky, and the most visually exciting elements of sunrise have passed, I turn to head back. A local, in his tennis-ball yellow Jeep (a color GM calls “Shock”) has stopped behind me to watch the sunrise, and generously offers me a ride back to the lot where I’ve parked. For the first time in three years, solstice dawn has brought color and a view of the sun, rather than simply a brightening of a cloud-shrouded sky. That, plus the kindness of a passing stranger, has me feeling lighter and easier than when I set out into the Long Night just over fifteen hours earlier.

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Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm 2.8 @20mm
ISO 100 1/160 f8
Processed in Capture One

2018 - A Solstice in Gray

Into the Long Night - Saco Heath

Just over an hour before sunset, with my camera belt strapped to my waist and traction spikes on my boots, I set off into the fog-blanketed gloom of the Saco Heath Preserve. Unseasonably warm rain pattered on the hood of my raincoat, and for once I was all alone as I traveled the slick boardwalk that wends through the woods and fragile marshlands.

The sparse heath and leaden sky seemed to me a fitting send-off for the final daylight of a year suffused with gloom. From a global perspective, the fact that the world didn't end in nuclear fire was perhaps the best thing that could be said for 2018. While political and cultural turmoil swept across the globe, along the way battering or obliterating the pillars of order and freedom that shaped the world my parents and I grew up in, illness and death also hit close to home for my family. Few people I suspect, will be sad to see this past year recede into memory.

Yet even on a wet and miserable winter day, there are glimpses of life and beauty on the Saco Heath. Shrubs and trees that have adapted to its hostile soil persist from year to year, and even in the deepest part of winter still to come, there will be green, living things to be seen there. In that too, the Heath seems a fitting place to see out the waning year, for there were victories and triumphs in my life since the last winter solstice as well.

The fading of the light isn't blatant the way it is on a clear day. Rather than brilliant gold sun being swallowed into blue twilight, the gray filling the sky merely grows imperceptibly deeper with every moment, the steadily climbing Auto-ISO numbers on my camera revealing what my eyes don't fully experience. At 4:08pm the alarm on my phone goes off, telling me that somewhere beyond the gray, the sun is at that moment vanishing below the horizon. I turn towards where the sun would be if I could see it, and shoot this photo, capturing the moment the world around me slipped quietly into the Longest Night.

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Sony A7iii w/Sony 16-35mm f4 @21mm

ISO8000 1/20 f6.3

Processed in Capture One and finished in Photoshop

Deep of the Long Night - Personal Fire

Deep into the night, I set off for Portland to shoot what I thought could be quite interesting photos. When my first shooting location didn't pan out, I headed to what I considered my “plan B,” where, after a treacherous hour of negotiating slick rocks in the rain, I fundamentally failed to capture the shot I had envisioned. Frustrated, sore, and soaked to the bone with chill water, I retreated to my car for the return trip home.

So, because sometimes the most powerful light in the darkness is the one we create for ourselves, I decided to build for myself a tiny fire to beat back the night. I was limited in the scope of what I could make, not having yet managed to get the permits required to have even a camp fire. Instead I sawed up some fatwood/rich lighter into small pieces and built a hot, smoky little fire in an antique cast iron cauldron. The following quite enjoyable forty minutes or so of turning my camera to the heart of the fire in the deep of the longest night went a long way to soothing the frustration I felt at the failure of my grander plans for the second photo of my solstice vigil.

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Sony A7iii w/Nikkor 55mm f3.5 AI

ISO1250 1/320

Processed in Capture One and finished with Topaz Studio

End of the Long Night - Rural Substation

The dawn of the waxing year came gradually, without a blazing sun rising to banish the night. Instead, the world around me slowly and evenly brightened, as behind thick shrouding clouds the sun began its march across the sky. The sun didn't even create a brighter spot against the flat, even, gray filling the world. Without the Photographer's Ephemaris to tell me where and when the sun was rising, I would have been unable to pinpoint its location or note when exactly the waxing year had begun. After a half hour past sunrise, I reluctantly returned home to finally get some rest.

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Sony A7iii w/Minolta MD 35-70 f3.5 Macro

ISO ISO500 1/60

Processed in Capture One and Photoshop