Peace… But a Storm is Coming

Living in a city for most of my adult life I only had the opportunity to appreciate the joys of watching a sunset in familiar surroundings when I moved to farmland in Hokkaido. I wrote a B&W “Sunset Story” when there was some cloud in the sky giving some added structure to the sunset image, but today was a rare clear blue sky though my emotions, reactions and the calmness of the environment were almost exactly the same. The temperature was dropping from the hot but bearable 29 degrees of the day. I wasn’t intending to take photographs, just a short 10 minute walk to the viewpoint to appreciate the calmness of the evening, but I grabbed the camera bag as a matter of course.

I climbed the steps to the viewing platform and scanned the view. Really there was nothing to photograph, a blank sky, distant mountains (25-50km away), at first the fields illuminated by the setting sun (featured image). I was there to appreciate the wide open views. I was there to hear – well, almost nothing, one bird in the distance, a slight breeze, briefly one car traveling into town, my own breathing – I was there to listen to peace. I was there to breathe the clean air, agricultural chemicals and tourist fumes were now well dispersed. I was there to be in the moment, to appreciate my own senses and being. As the sun set the light gradually softened into dusk. The emptiness of the sky, the lack of sound, the freshness of the air formed a harmonious background as I looked, listened and breathed.

I wanted to capture the peace of the environment, unique at this time of day. Looking up I was reminded of The Sky Book by Misrach, images of the sky but no groundscape. I wanted to anchor my images to this place but also capture calm written in the subtly changing colours and brightness of the sky.

Back home looking at the images and thinking about the emotions I experienced one thing came to mind: Mahler’s 6th (aka “Tragic”) symphony. Neither humanity nor nature is at peace.

The weather forecast the next day was for changing weather, rain and a thunderstorm the following day. I decided to return to the viewpoint again, the last chance for me for several weeks because of travel. This time it was not so quiet, the birds reacting to the change in the weather and chattering away noisily until dusk, but I too was not so quiet – the internal calm of the previous day was no longer there. Perhaps my body too knew a storm was coming. There was another photographer at the viewpoint but she was quiet, seemingly taking me as a subject with the sunset in the background.

Images were taken on a Sony A7Riii with a Loxia Zeiss Planar 50mm lens at f8 on the first night and a Sony 20mm f1,8 lens at f8 or f5.6 on the second night, all shot at iso100 on standard colour setting; some cropping of the in-camera jpgs and occasionally a small contrast adjustment.

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