Not that much to say here. An accidental photo in multiple senses—I’d meant to throw the focal point on the tree in the foreground but was ultimately pleased about where it had ended up. I hadn’t really thought of the light as the central value of the composition but that’s what it was when I looked at it later.
It took me years to understand why I was much happier taking pictures in winter than in summer. This shot was early in my photographic rambles, in this case close by in the Crum Woods behind Swarthmore College, and I was already realizing that it was just more pleasing by far to me to be shooting then. Again, this is where self-learning has a big downside—a point that any experienced visual artist could have made to me instantly, that was a banal insight, that the light was better because it was lower on the horizon and because dawn and dusk were better synchronized with the times I wanted to walk before and after work, and that the light was casting more interesting shadows and illuminating shapes because the leaves were gone was a point I had to arrive at out of unreflective and repeated experience. Then again once I understood, I really understood, which is kind of the way it goes with directed learning too—you get told something, you remember it, but it doesn’t mean anything until your experience backs it up.
So true on many levels.