I was half way through writing this morning’s post…on a shot of Burdock flowers (which you will now see later this week)…when I went to the kitchen to pour hot water over my tea and was caught by the sky above the back yard. It sucked me right out the sliding doors on to the deck, camera in hand, to catch it before it passed. A moments work to pop the card into the laptop and do a bit of process in Lightroom, press publish to put it on the web, and a moment more to copy it in here. So this is really a pic 4 today…a pic of today…of this morning, a few (not more than 15) moments ago as I begin to write this.

As to why…well we have the framing trees with the early sun just hitting the tops of the tallest, and spread of the wispy clouds out over the blue of the sky…the suggestion that this is, somehow, a swirl of motion frozen…it just draws me into the image…up and out of my self a bit.

Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.

Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom. A touch of Fill Light and cropped slightly from the bottom for composition.

So, for a Sunday morning, a spontaneous composition leading to a spontaneous capture and what I hope is a spontaneous response. Spontaneous has come to mean “natural, unforced, impulsive, without forethought, in and of the moment” and I hope it applies to this image in all those ways…but a little research yields the fact that the word spontaneous entered the English language from late Latin in 1653, derived from sponte…meaning ”of one’s free will.”

I like that.

I like that spontaneous should mean an act of will…not just something that happens unexpectedly and without forethought…but an active response, a willed response, to whatever comes, to whatever happened. There is a sense in which I was compelled to capture an image of the sky over the back yard this morning, but there was also a moment when I willed myself to do it. It would have been so easy to let the moment pass…not to go find the camera…not to frame the sky with trees…not to juggle camera settings (minimal as I keep them) in my head…not to press the shutter release…not process the image…not to post it here. So much easier really, not to respond to the spontaneous sight of clouds against the morning sky. So much hangs on the gap between vision and image…on the acts of will inspired by the spontaneous display of beauty, pathos, or power that always catches the eye and mind.

And yet, it all feels spontaneous…unforced, natural…of my own free will…because, at the root, it is just the way I am made. Learned skills and camera technique aside, that impulse to participate in the acts of creation around me by recording and sharing them is just part of who I am…my own creative impulse…and I recognize it as a gift from the same oh so very free will that spontaneously arranged the sun and clouds and trees this morning above my backyard. Happy Sunday.