Exhibition

It had been raining lightly from late afternoon so when, just before dark, the room suddenly lit up, I was drawn to a window and grabbing my camera, ran outside – after first ensuring I would not be disturbing the deer.

We are lucky to have open horizons where this sort of spectacle is not unusual, but I always feel compelled to photograph it. My iPhone’s wide angle captures the entire rainbow, but I used my camera as well:

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The iPhone picture is obviously more pleasing, but I don’t know that it is more accurate. The camera, I believe got the colour of the sky right, but the iPhone captured the brightness.

Neither device is capable of capturing the magnificence. Perhaps I am overly impressionable, but when beholding a rainbow such as this, to me the air appears charged with golden light that seems to brush the skin like the sheerest silk.

Such moments are all the more special for their brevity.

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Turning away from the rainbow, the iPhone did a better job of capturing the colour.

Later, my computer played one of its tiresome games of hide-and-seek. When I went to pull up the pictures, I found only 3 or 4 from the iPhone, whereas I knew I’d taken more. I concluded that I had somehow failed to make the clicks, but I was not convinced.

Suddenly this morning: “Hello! Here we are!”

Those shots had taken longer to download? Improbable. Then – they disappeared again.

What the…?

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The photos are there, I just have to access them a different way, even though they were taken seconds apart from the set of images that appear where I expected them to – ???

Yesterday, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to make some sort of order out of my photo archives, a task far too long neglected. In the process, I began uncovering photos long forgotten which is one of those bittersweet sort of processes, certainly when it comes to departed friends.

So far I’ve only scratched the surface, but one group of photos that came to light were from a visit to New York City in the spring of 2019, when I went to see my old travel buddy Tim and his cat Oscar. I’d always wondered where those photos went and had decided I must have deleted them. I didn’t stop to examine them when they popped up, planning to come back when I had more time, so I gave them their own album.

Yup, I did. The album is there – but not the photos. Still, given my experience with the rainbow, I have faith that they still exist – somewhere.

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24 hours apart, such a different scene.

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It may seem there is nothing very remarkable in such an evening. I would not have thought so either, until I came to live here.

Looking from my new kitchen window, I realised that for most of my life, I’d not had a good view of the sky from anywhere I’d lived. My little point-and-shoot camera got a workout and as I’ve been going through my archive, I’ve come upon a range of skies since 2018 – all wonderful, all completely different.

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Works of art.

11 hours later, another canvas.

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Unlike pictures at an exhibition, these are fluid.

And the exhibition is free of charge.

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Instead of Pictures at an Exhibition, here’s a shorter piece:

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