There’s a small visual memory that I’ve been carrying around for years, in my head. I have thought that it would turn up someday in a story I wrote, and who knows, maybe it still might…but right now it’s relevant to my photography journey. It has to do with light and the things it does.
It may have been close to twenty years ago, maybe more, but I was driving on Union Road in Cheektowaga, NY, maybe on my way to the Walden Galleria or the Borders Bookstore there (before it eventually closed, obviously). It was a warm summer day, and while I was driving, one of those quick in-and-out thunderstorms rolled through. You know the type, the ones that announce themselves with a sudden darkening of the skies, some lightning and thunder, and with a few big fat drops coming down before the skies open up. And the storm is over as quickly as it came; ten minutes or so of rain, another five or ten minutes of slackening and clearing, and then the sun is back out and you’re looking at the back of the storm clouds as they depart.
And everything now is wet. The whole world, it seems, has been momentarily soaked.
That was the case as I was driving that day. Storm barrels through and leaves, and the sun comes back out and everything is soaked.
But after such a storm, everything also has been suddenly cleaned and made shiny again, and the pavement itself is gleaming and shiny with the brilliant post-rain light. And on this particular day, as I drove up Union Rd. behind some other guy, I saw something amazing that I’ve never seen since: because the car in front of me was kicking up spray from the water still on the street, and because the bright afternoon sun was shining through that spray, that sunlight was getting broken up into a spectrum. Two tiny spectrums, that is–one for each tire.
Put another way: it was like the car in front of me was driving on rainbows.
I had never seen that before. I had never seen light do that before.
And I’ve never forgotten that. I thought it was a detail I’d save for use in a story someday. I never thought it was a lesson my brain was filing away for when I’d find myself in a place where recognizing light as an active force would be desirable.
One constant recommendation I see in photography content aimed at beginners and novices is to shoot at “Golden Hour”: the hour or so surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the light is bright and golden and rich and amazing. And yes, this is great advice. Everybody should shoot at Golden Hour when they can. (That last, “when they can”, is something I’ll need to address another time.)
There’s another time when I think the light is frankly astonishing, and that’s right after one of those rainstorms. Maybe you won’t see rainbows under the wheels of the car in front of you, but you’ll see amazing gleaming and reflections that you won’t see any other time. You’ll see color that’s somehow cleaner, more perfect, than at just about any other time. You’ll see light doing things that you won’t see any other time.
Last week I was on the roof at work. I’m required to go up there a few times a month to check things out, verify that there is no existing damage to the roof membrane, check the functioning of rooftop-mounted HVAC systems and exhaust fans, stuff like that. Well, while I was up there, on a sunny day, one of those ten-minute storms raged through. I just hung out in one of the machine houses while it went on by, dumping water on everything, and then sure as anything, the sun was back out. I continued my walk, eventually moving along the part of the roof at the front of The Store, the part that overlooks the parking lot.
What I saw amazed me, so I pulled out my phone and took a quick shot and did a quick edit in Snapseed.
It wasn’t just the way that the sun was gleaming off the cars that had been suddenly washed by rain to a high shine. It wasn’t just the way the colors of those cars popped as if they had been painted by some master. It wasn’t just the way those gleaming surfaces reflected off the wet pavement.
It was all of that, at once.
We often think of “the light” as a passive thing, but no…in this moment the light was active. It was dancing in the clean air after the storm. And I saw it.
So I guess that was the lesson from all those years ago: not that I had seen something that might be useful in a story or an essay, but that I had seen that light doesn’t just shine. It dances and bobs and weaves and flits and does all that kind of Carl Sandburg stuff.
Not a bad lesson for a photographer to receive, huh?
