The way I see it, I have quite a bit in common with my little car. As long as I keep her batteries topped off and plan things well, there’s really proven to be nowhere she can’t take me. It’s been an adjustment coming from a petrol car, but there are great resources out there to help, and we’ve adjusted well.
I’ve got to learn to do the same in terms of taking care of myself, including doing what I can to keep my mental and physical “batteries” in the green.
Read MoreIt 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.
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.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm f2.8 @21mm
ISO 2500 1/125 f7.1
Processed in Capture One
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.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 @75mm
ISO 160 3.2 seconds f8
Processed in Capture One
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.
Sony A7iii w/Tamron 17-28mm 2.8 @20mm
ISO 100 1/160 f8
Processed in Capture One
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.
Sony A7iii w/Sony 16-35mm f4 @21mm
ISO8000 1/20 f6.3
Processed in Capture One and finished in Photoshop
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.
Sony A7iii w/Nikkor 55mm f3.5 AI
ISO1250 1/320
Processed in Capture One and finished with Topaz Studio
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.
Sony A7iii w/Minolta MD 35-70 f3.5 Macro
ISO ISO500 1/60
Processed in Capture One and Photoshop
I used to write a weekly column for Bil Browning's The Bilerico Project called Picture Tells A Story. My grandfather died suddenly this afternoon, and for whatever twist of how I manage grief, I knew that the best thing I could do for myself was go shoot the sunset and write a PTAS about grandpa, so here it is.
Sunset at Camp Ellis Maine - May 8th 2018
Sony A7ii w/Minolta MD 35-70mm f3.5 Macro
When the sun rose on May 8th, my grandfather was alive, for all I know he even watched it. But by the time the sun set, he was gone. I took this photo standing on the dock at Camp Ellis, watching as for the first time in over ninety-four years, the sun set on a world without him in it. Everyone reacts to grief differently, and I knew that what I needed this evening was to watch and capture this sunset.
I'm fond of saying that grandpa was a rock for his family, and for so many other people. He was a point of stability, doing what he could to support, ground, and shore up the people he cared about. But at the same time, as is common with rock, flexibility wasn't often his virtue. Those he cared about too often found themselves dashed against him by the waves of life, and he could leave figurative scrapes and bruises on our spirits without ever being aware of it.
The last few years had been especially hard on my grandfather. For a man who grew up in Brooklyn having his milk delivered by horse and buggy, life in the internet age was often frustrating and alienating. To his last day, he remained sharp, independent, and engaged in life, which he first had shared with his childhood sweetheart, my grandmother, for well over fifty years, and then with his beloved companion Barbra for more than another decade.
But that sharpness came with a cost of its own. As a man who believed strongly in the American Dream and the potential for business and capitalism to be a force for social good, the Great Recession and corporate shift to seeing seeing employees as disposable, with businesses having no sense of loyalty other than to their shareholders, frustrated him to no end. Having grown up before the Second World War, in which he served in the Army, he had experienced no small amount of anti-semitism in his life. The rise of the Alt Right and the accession of Donald Trump to the presidency worried and disgusted him as an American, a Jew, and a businessman from NYC.
Beyond that though, grandpa often saw himself as the last man standing of the people who had made up so much of his life. All his childhood, and even most of his long-time adulthood friends are gone, as are his brothers, and the sister he never got to meet. My uncle was probably the person left on earth who had known my grandfather the longest. It's a strange and difficult thing to outlive one's past.
There is not enough room on the page to delve into the ways my grandfather shaped who I am today, in ways both good and not-so-good. But what I will say is that throughout my whole life, I never once doubted that he loved me. And for all his inflexibility in much of his life, he worked hard to roll with myriad challenges of loving me as his grandson. Through the development of my severe Tourette, to my coming out as queer, my polyamorous relationships, even my... less than conventional career paths, grandpa was often puzzled and dubious, but always loving.
So while the sun set on a world without him in it anymore, I take solace in knowing that I carry his love, and as long as the sun rises on I, and so many others he cared about, he continues to be part of our world.
I love the Winter Solstice. The Long Night, at once glorious and terrifying, marks the death of the year gone by and the birth of a new year with the return of the waxing sun.. For me it is time for reflection, as I stay up through the darkness to greet the newborn sun. One way I experience my own inner spiritual life is through art, and for the second year in a row, I decided to mark the three key milestones of the Long Night, sunset, deep of the night, and sunrise, by taking photographs.
I gave a great deal of thought to where I would experience each stage of the Solstice, venturing much farther from home that last year to be at the places that fit how the different aspects of the Solstice resonated for me.
The odd wooden structures are as eerie as ever when I arrive at my sundown shooting location. I am sore, and a bit out of breath as I am getting set up, having had to rush my walk to the site after getting stuck at a train crossing on the drive over. I don't honestly know what these things are. Are they crosses commemorating a person or event, decrepit navigational markers, or something else entirely?
A short distance behind where this photo was taken is the disintegrating remains of a turn of the century lifeboat that was being restored by a young man who was called off to WWII in the middle of the project. When he didn't return, his family left the boat exactly as he had, and more than seventy years later it isn't long for this world. Combine that with the maybe-cross, and the whole area feels like a memorial.
Altogether an appropriate place to witness the unlamented dying of a brutal year.
Fuji X-T1 w/Fuji 23mm f1.4
3-exposure blend
ISO200, varied shutter speeds, f8
Processed in Capture One & Photoshop
The true midpoint of the Long Night here in Southern Maine was eleven-thirty-nine, a time that is well past when I arrive at Dyer Cove. I prioritized a late dinner with my husband, who works second shift, over astronomical precision.
I am not where I originally planned to be for this stage of my Solstice observation. I had planned to shoot a lighthouse, with its beams of light providing a bulwark against the dangers in the dark, and did a highly successful test shot nearby the night before.
But that is not where I am meant to be in this moment. Many years ago, in the midst of another dark and scary time, the Norse god Frey told me that I had to carry my own light into darkness. After the year gone by, both personally and in the broader world, I need this light to be of my own making. Here in the cave, I know that light will be reflected back and amplified, as well as that the cave will provide a safe and sheltered space for the shot.
Fuji X-T1 w/Rokinon 12mm f2
ISO400, 15 seconds, f11
Processed in Capture One & Photoshop
The roads are already crowded as I get on the highway heading to Fort Preble for the first dawn of the returning sun, though I am all alone when I reach my destination. The sky is not promising, with heavy leaden clouds obscuring all but a small band of hazy sky on the horizon. The radio on my drive has been full of warnings that a significant storm is incoming.
This is not news to me.
Nonetheless, the sun makes an appearance, if only for a few scant minutes before disappearing into the clouds. Blazing a path through the gap of clouds at the horizon and the canon port in the fort wall, the rays of the new sun briefly warms my skin before the world is once again painted in cool shades of blue and gray.
The year once again has transitioned from waning to waxing, the eternal dance of the sun and planets a reassuring moment of continuity in an increasingly uncertain time.
Fuji X-T1 w/Fuji 18-55 f2.8-4 @36mm
ISO800, 1/80, f8
Processed in Capture One & Photoshop