12-25-16 Into the Woods

By Scott Shephard

View fullsize

This is an example of one of the tens of thousands of photos I have that sit in my figurative "photo closet." I took it a few years ago while exploring rural Maryland. The sun was going down and I was drawn by the way the leaves were being backlit by the strong sunlight. In another 20 minutes this would have been an entirely different scene.

When I approached this grove of trees along the road, I thought of the line from Macbeth:

Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to th' rooky wood.

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

It's an ominous statement made by Macbeth about a pending murder in a play that brilliantly plays evil against good and uses light and darkness to help do this.

Good photography uses light and shadow, too, of course, and this photo may demonstrate that. Macbeth's night was a thing to be feared but the coming night in Maryland wasn't. It seemed like a safe and civilized place. :-)

Canon 5DIII 1/160s f/7.1 ISO250 75mm 

04-27-16 A View from Our Porch

View fullsize

By Scott Shephard

Deb and I have re-located for a few days and our first stop is a small house above Cane Garden Bay on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It gets up to 85 degrees pretty regularly here and at night it dips down to 83. Pretty boring, I guess.

I hear that snow is forecast for parts of our home state. Unless climate change takes a bizarre turn, we won't see any snow here. :-)

Canon 5DIII 1/10s f/8.0 ISO200 27mm (3 frame HDR)

03-12-16 A Pretty Good View

By Scott Shephard

On our recent visit to southern California Deb and I drove over to Point Loma, a peninsula across the bay from San Diego. We went to see the famous tide pools on the western side but I ended up spending more time photographing the Rosecrans National Cemetery, which is located there, than I did anything else.

I have always been drawn to cemeteries as photographic subjects though I don't often share the pictures I take there. Military cemeteries are especially compelling, in part because they are symbols of sacrifice and in part because of the symmetry, color and geometry that draw my eye.

Beyond all of this, though, the most striking thing to me about the Rosecrans National Cemetery is that it is full. After putting 110,000 soldiers to rest, this cemetery has no more vacancies. Maybe once the military cemeteries all fill up we could find less violent ways to resolve our differences. . . . ?

Canon 5DIII 1/750s f/11.0 ISO250 98mm