Friday, December 23, 2011

Light is sufficient to itself—
If Others want to see
It can be had on Window Panes
Some Hours in the Day.

But not for Compensation—
It holds as large a Glow
To Squirrel in the Himmaleh
Precisely, as to you.

Emily Dickinson





Wednesday was the longest night of the year or as I prefer to call it, the shortest day. I spent most of it inside with two colds (one per nostril). You see I had this cold and when it was almost gone another came and both seem to get along just fine in the company of my body. It was a bad day to stay inside as the sun was out and I could have worked in the garden. Rosemary did and I could see her being followed wherever she went by her cat Casi-Casi.

In this latest sequence blog of running pictures to illustrate Emily Dickinson poems I knew that there was surely one poem on light and it is one of my favourites. It begins with: There is a certain slant of light which I have already illustrated here. But I found another that fits better with the picture of Madeleine Morris I took a summer long ago.

In this digital age of photography photographers are able to edit the pictures they do not like. These pictures go to a digital oblivion where their zero and one pixels join the cloud of emptiness which of late we suspect is occupied by a molasses-like substance predicted by a gentleman called Jack Higgs.

We who still shoot film tend to keep everything in our files even though they occupy a physical space, and in my case, in my basement nmetal file cabinets.

I knew that there was one picture of Madeleine taken with fast Ektachrome which I pushed in processing from 800 to 1600 IS0 but I forgot to tell my Nikon about. The slide is very overexposed.  I like it and I think that it, and she, and Dickinson’s poem fit just about perfect.