I have done a lot of travel in the last 30 days. I spent significant time in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (Harlingen to McAllen), in New Mexico (Albuquerque, Gallup, Bosque del Apache), and at Wildcatter Ranch in Graham Texas. But now I am home in Southern Maine for 3 weeks…one already past…and vacation time the next two. I still have a few images from Texas and New Mexico to post, but I forced myself away from the computer yesterday long enough to get out on the local patch and see what was happening photographically.

It was chancy day…little balls of ice falling off and on, trying to convince us it was snow…and massive rolling cloud cover doing its best to make a gloomy December day. I drove down toward the ocean and my favorite walk along the Kennebunk Bridle Path through the marshes beside the Mousam river. The landscape was, indeed, dull…a winter landscape without the saving grace of snow. Brown grasses, bare trees, and, under the overcast, steely waters…as chill as the wind on this 30 degree day.

But the sky was impressive. And behind those clouds the sun was making every effort to break through. The clouds were shot through with light, and full of form and shadow. It was truly a dimension sky and pulled the otherwise dull landscape out of its doldrums.

This is looking toward the sea from the Route 9 bridge over the Mousam. Now that is what I call a sky, and I composed with just enough land in the foreground to give it scale.

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent. Program and iContrast, with –1/3EV exposure compensation. f8 @ 1/1600th @ ISO 200. This was great exposure for the sky (and I tipped the camera up when metering to bias it for the sky) but it left the foreground dark and lifeless. Fill Light, rather heavy, in Lightroom restored some life to the landscape, and a blackpoint adjustment restored it even more. Finally I used Auto Color Temperature to offset the under-corrected blue bias from the camera’s Auto white balance setting. All of which brought it pretty close to what I saw standing there.

So, for the Sunday thought: no matter where you roam, and no matter how dull by comparison, it is always good to be home for the holidays. As a photographer I am not really anywhere until I can see the beauty and experience the wonder of the landscape I am in…and that can be a challenge at home. But it must be done. You do have to come home, all of you, everything that is you, for the holidays. In the house, we have been listening to Christmas music (and I have bought my limit of three new Christmas albums), and last night we put up the tree and decorated it and set up the crèche. Packages have been arriving all week from Amazon. The kids are gathering in or setting arrival schedules. The season is in gear. But until I went out yesterday to find the beauty and wonder in the winter dull landscape, I was not really home. We will, of course, have sunny days sometime in the next two weeks, and I can still hope for snow for Christmas, but whatever happens now is okay…I am home for the holidays. And glad to be here.