There are some scenes I can photograph over and over. In fact, if a scene is worth photographing once, chances are, it is worth photographing again…many times. The basic conformation of the landscape might not change (at least during the reasonable life-time of a tree), but if there is water involved, water is never the same twice, and the sky, of course, is always changing. I was reminded by a TV show I watched this week on Amazon Prime (Inspector Lewis, if you must know), that the painter Constable, during one period of his life, went out daily, to the same spot, and painted the sky…clouds in particular…because he was fascinated by ever changing play of light and form.

Back Creek, about 2 miles from our front door, is such a place for me. The road to our closest beach crosses Back Creek about 400 yards from were it empties into the Mousam River. It is a tidal creek in every sense, and the water is constantly rushing under the bridge in one direction or the other, as the road creates a dam that catches water on the up tide, and releases it on the down. Yesterday, during my Easter Saturday photo-prowl, we had an exceptionally high tide, and I was there just at the crest. I had made a run down for the sky, which promised great things from our doorstep, but when I got there, the marsh on either side of the road was completely under water. That is rare enough to be of note. And the sky lived up to its promise. A front was coming in from the south-west, and the leading edge of the cloud cover, ragged big soft clouds with gaps of blue, was filling the sky in that direction, piling backward more densely over the horizon. It was awesome!

With the water right up against the road, only a foot below the road in fact, I flipped out the LCD on the Canon and got down to ground level to shoot out across the water from a low angle. This shot, on the side of the road away from the sea and sheltered from the wind, the reflections are just as important as the sky.

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. I am astounded, and delighted, with this little camera’s ability to capture a scene like this without resorting to any HDR techniques. All it needed was pretty standard processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.

Now it is, of course, Easter Sunday. I live by faith in the risen one. It is a choice I have made, and I know that, but most of the time it feels like I was compelled to that choice. It was always a gentle compulsion…a matter of how I am made and how the world is…in the end an inability to deny the awe I feel in life, in living here and now, every day. I was made to ask why and how…in the end, I found I could not avoid asking who…and the answer, despite every evasion I could come up with, was right there, planted in long ago Sunday and Vacation Bible School encounters, and nurtured over time by a patient spirit revealing wonder at every turn. There are some stories, some truths, you can return to over and over, every day, because they are never the same twice. They are alive, like the land and water scape under clouds, and I come back again and again to see what wonder they display today…how my mind and heart are illuminated, refreshed, reborn in the light of what the risen one has for me today. Happy Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed.