Annalia S.'s photos with the keyword: last light

Most of my life I have been a night owl. If I got to work at 9:00 a.m., it would be 11:00, if not noon, by the time my brain actually started moving at anything like the required speed and my most productive time was always in the late afternoon and into the evening. Not anymore. Old turkey that I am getting to be, by 4:00, 4:30 p.m., with at least another hour left in my work day, I start losing concentration and making mistakes. So I step outside for a 10 minute break, to clear my head, think of something else. This time of year, with the autumn colors in the nearby park and the resident birds cleaning up the berries on the courtyard bushes, I find plenty of sights to divert my attention from work matters. On this particular day, however, I had no sooner stepped outside that my photographer’s eye caught something that sent me scampering back upstairs. “That was a mighty short break ….” commented my colleague. I grabbed my camera out of my purse and promised to explain later. Light, you see, doesn’t leave you time for chit chat if you want to catch it at the right time. What you see here is the deeply ridged driveway ramp that leads down to the underground garage at my work place. Just before setting below the nearby land features, the light from the sun was coming in at a low angle and illuminating only the very top of the ridges. A lone fallen leaf from a nearby tree, still in its pretty autumn livery, seemed to have chosen this particular spot as a final resting place, going out in style with a little help from the westering sun. I am always thrilled by this kind of images, where mundane, everyday things turn out to have a claim to beauty. They remind me of the advice my art teacher father would obsessively give his students: “The subject matter of your best work will always be what you see around you everyday, the stuff you can picture in detail even with your eyes closed, that you know as intimately as the inside of your pockets.” As his students were rural kids, what they knew best were cows, chickens, barns, the woods, the mountains. They usually balked, at least at first, at this advice. “That’s boring stuff! “ they complained, “we want to draw interesting things, you know, stuff like spaceships, castles and unicorns, airplanes and race cars …” But, of course, he was right: their pictures of far away places and things they knew little about lacked detail, were naive and even a bit ridiculous or at best commonplace. By contrast, an oil painting by one of his students, featuring a maze of ink-black, intricate tree boles in the woods, with leaves in lurid colors that seemed to be flying in your face, was for years the centre piece on our living room wall. It had a dark, ominous quality that told the story of an adventure turned dangerous, of having wandered too deep into the woods and lost your way, of a familiar place turned scary when a storm hid the sun and plunged it in darkness. To this day, I still see that painting clearly in my mind’s eye.

This is an image from several years ago, when my Mom was still alive and typically grumbling because we didn't come and mow the lawn quite as often as she would have liked. It just fit my mood on a day like today with October still very mild in temperatures and lawns still green in the evening light. HFF everyone!

This is the time of year when biking home along the Arno River puts me right in the middle of a light show. On one side, the sun goes down bathing the Arno River in sunset colors as it flows downstream (see PIP), while upstream the city turns to gold in the last light. It makes for a moment when I can forget these scary times for a bit. I hope it does the same for you.

The light at the end of the day shines through an ornate fence casting a squiggly shadow on a cobblestoned driveway in a small hamlet just outside the city of Florence. Freed from the worst of the lockdown strictures, I have finally been able to resume my "fence-hunting". I know you, of all people, will appreciate just how good that feels ... :))) Happy Fence Friday to everyone!