Figure 1 – Christmas Eve sunset # 3, Heard Farm, Wayland, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I have always felt that the best analogue photograph of my “youth” was a picture that I took from a bridge over a canal in Amsterdam, NL. The light was truly there in its luminous glory for an instant and I went into automatic mode and well was lucky, I guess. In a sense every photograph that I have taken since, I am trying to recapture that moment.

Yesterday, I posted a photograph of our Christmas Eve 2015 in New England and there are two more images of that sunset that I would like to share.  The first is Figure 1. Taken at Hear Farm in Wayland, Massachusetts from down along the Sudbury River, it shows the sun breaking through the clouds and reflecting off the water. As I was looking through the viewfinder I was thinking of that wonderful moment in Amsterdam 45 years ago with my Leica.

This image is meant to evoke the primordial mix of water and sky. It is also meant to capture the peculiar sense of a world meant to be cold and dark instead being warm and if not dark then illuminated. The sun appears as if it is boiling away the clouds. And this is stated more strongly in a telephoto zoom of the same clouds a few moments later when the sun’s disk becomes visible.

Figure 2 – Christmas Eve sunset # 2, Heard Farm, Wayland, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/3200 at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 2 – Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000 at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.