Spring is a visually and sensually confusing season in the mid-Atlantic. It changes moods suddenly: wet and cold, violently stormy, quiet and sunny at the edge of being warm. And then just as you’re enjoying the change, it’ll flip to humid and hot, often well before summer officially begins.
Autumn is a long slow cruise into winter. Whole weeks of mellow cooling can unfold as it deepens into itself. It’s a time where the light slips down towards the horizon and catches the walls of flaming color that run through forests, along ridges, crowding along the edges of meadows and open spaces.
Spring, on the other hand, is something different everywhere you look. A barren tree here with long weeks ahead before it buds into green, but right next to it a magnolia bursting with heavy blooms. Over there a line of short trees with a green fuzz of budding like a high schooler trying to grow a beard, over there a witch hazel that already did its flowering and is now on to the regular business of photosynthesis.
It’s hard to know what to look at, what to make of what you see, and hard in particular if you’re walking around with a camera to decide what to put inside a frame. Many flowers appear unremarkable when they become the entire subject, but many trees with a glorious burst of flowers diminish when they’re the subject. Come in too tight and you miss the whole thing, go out too far and it’s hard to see what the big deal is.
My campus is a beautiful arboretum that goes on and on through the spring into the summer in successive waves of flowers and leafing like a spectacular fireworks show, and I’ve spend many days trying to isolate subjects and get it right. I’m rarely happy with the results. The closest I get, I think, is something like this shot, where I don’t try to present a flowering tree or plant in its totality but give some sense of the visual field it presents when you look at it with a focused eye.