Road to Infinity

Yesterday I did something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. You know when you're driving along a highway and it's a beautiful sunny day and the road stretches out in front of you and it seems to go on forever, to, like, infinity? I've been wanting to capture that feeling in a photo. It's the Great American Dream of the Highway with Dinah Shore singing, "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet..." and topping it off with a big wet smack. What could be better?




As bad as texting while driving is, photographing while driving is probably even worse and not recommended. (Don't try this in a car.) I didn't abuse it and luckily didn't crash, but I was driven to it (so to speak) by my desire to take photos for the weather blog that I've been participating in for the past nearly two weeks. I've been walking around a lot with my camera in an effort to capture things and post them to my partners in Sweden. It's really made me see more clearly and deeply (I am a camera.) and has been an enriching process. I'll miss it when it's over after this weekend. And then move on to the next thing, I suppose.

Night and Day

Taking photos to exchange with my Swedish partners for the weather blog has driven me to experiment with my camera as never before. I even went outside last night IN THE ACTUAL DARK and shot some photos. That was fun and I experimented with flash/no flash/slow flash, etc. with surprising results (at least surprising to me). I was unprepared for the drama that night photography gave to mundane scenes.

Night Shadows (taken last night, March 6th, in the backyard)

Day shadows - taken today - same view

Night Reflections

Day Reflections - same shot

Last night - trees with pinprick moon

Today - same trees but with celestial blue sky

Today was a beautiful day - the first really warm day that promised not to be a singular aberation. The ground is soggy with snowmelt and tonight it's started raining with three more days of rain to come. But green things are happening. This long, miserable winter is finally starting to lift. Relief is in sight accompanied by The First crocus.





Buds are swelling, birds are making spring calls and activity is beginning all around. But before it all that breaks into full-bloom spring, we have to get through Mud Season:

and worse is yet to come

Weather Diptychs

The weather blog is an "international photo project about weather, emotion and communicating through photography" that was conceived by two artists as part of the Transcultural Exchange 2009 project. Miriam Songster of New York and Hege Dons Samset of Berlin designed a three-part project consisting of the weather photos blog (also known as "We Are Having Weather"), a video exhibition in Shanghai Zendai MoMA in November 2008 and participation in "Here, There and Everywhere", part of the Transcultural Exchange conference to be held in Boston in April 2009.

I learned about the weather blog from Alicia Hunsicker, who participated in it online and also in the exhibition in China. Beginning later today, between 4 and 5 pm, I will start posting photos to the weather blog along with my partner, the Raketa crew of Stockholm, Sweden. Raketa describes themselves as: "a network of people running interdisciplinary, collaborative projects and experiments within art, design, architecture and digital media." Sounds exciting!

The idea is that the weather blog partners communicate with each other through their photos about the weather and their emotional response to the weather. Each partner is supposed to post at least one photo a day, and the idea is to respond to each other, not just keep posting from your own perspective.

So I've been taking photos documenting the weather, but I don't know if I'll post all of them to the blog because I will wait to see what my partners do. But the contrast between yesterday's weather and today's is pretty extreme. I shot some comparison views and am posting them below as diptychs. The first picture in a set was taken yesterday, March 1st, and the second image was today, March 2nd. They are all taken in my yard or looking out the window.

I won't show you the image I am first going to post to the weather blog. You'll have to go there to look tonight. We will be in the sidebar list under: Nancy (Massachusetts, USA) + Raketa (Sweden).