November Blues

On the way toward 4 o'clock sunsets, seemingly endless precipitation, but lacking snow, November is the most miserable month of the year.

At least if you live in the North. It's a pretty decent month in warmer climates in our hemisphere, as my own travel experience could attest.

But I live in the North.

Indeed, I didn't quite grasp the full extent of its dreariness until I moved from the Everlit Electric City to a small town, in which only a handful of central streets is adequately lit after sunset.

I don't quite live on one of such streets.

Most people here don't.

And so I am doomed to dampness, darkness, and deer rustling outside the window—stars or the Moon often obscured by heavy, though unseen cloud cover—reluctantly increasing my caffeine intake to fight the urge to hibernate and dreaming of another time.

Rain is Gone, but Clouds Swirl

Clouds swirl over the tree tops, and how different they do look in the span of 24 hours!

One timelapse depicts cotton-like clouds over hazy, near-colorless mountain peaks. Counterintuitively, it is as if these soggy trees are smoking.

The other shows clouds dissipate at sundown over the woods to reveal brilliant sunshine.

London after the Rain

My favorite aspect of The City--any metropolis--after a torrential downpour is not the brilliant sunshine that comes afterward (sometimes, there is none). It is the reflections on the pavement giving an extra--skewed--dimension to an already multi-layered urban space. Perhaps, that is obvious. Less so, however, are the little pops of color here and there, like shed autumn leaves, that become just a little bit brighter.

Considering the brevity of my photographic adventure in London, I've included two teaser images I've posted earlier. 

Evening Shower

You may have noticed that I've been posting a considerable amount of images shot in the rain or under active water. 

This is a relatively new area for me, and for good reason. A few years ago, I visited Germany, Austria, and Italy, photographing standard tourist imagery--and my friends along the way--with a digital point-and-shoot. I ended up getting caught in the rain at the Coliseum, of all places, losing the entire contents of the memory card in the process to irreversible damage.    

As a result, I've been quite reluctant to shoot under wet conditions, even though many digital SLRs claim to be weather-resistant. 

Until now. 

I am quite fascinated by the variety of abstraction--not to mention an evocative atmosphere--one gets from water obscuring parts of an image.

 

 The above, for instance, is a grouse standing on a stone bench and enjoying a bit of a shower on a local mountain.

Oh, and this might be a good place to mention that I did lose a smartphone to a similar kind of irreparable damage a few weeks ago despite wearing a serious raincoat!

Waterdrops on a Blade of Grass

This might surprise those who see that many of my Nature-related images feature overwhelming, exuberant colors: in my personal life, I often gravitate toward minimalism, prefer minimalism in design aesthetics (German, Japanese), and so on. 

On occasion, this preference appears in my photographs, like this single blade of grass covered in water drops set on fire by the Sun:

Yes, you can click to enlarge!

I have also been concerned with the idea of seeing beauty in the mundane, the everyday, in byt. Of course, a certain variant of the latter appears in many different cultures throughout different time periods. My fascination, specifically, was sparked by reading Russia's Silver-Age poetry. (At times, I had more interest in this aesthetic direction than the poetry itself!)