Tonle Sap, Cambodia

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Cambodia, the first time: Super-saturated colors-  jungle greens built by monsoon rains, temples red from iron leached into sandstone. 

And the lake:

It was the end of the rainy season, when the lake is four times its dry-season size and this same location would be drained and dusty.

I have been back to Cambodia in other seasons, and re-visited many of these sites, finding, of course, changes-  the vine growing up the temple just a bit thicker.  That waterfall a trickle in the dry season.  The greens somewhat staler.  But I haven't returned to the lake.  Photos fix moments in time- even when the subjects overwrite themselves and move on.  I'd like to keep the lake fixed-  as blue as it is in these photos, and not overwrite it with the bleached browns of dusty, abandoned streets.

That First Roll of Infrared Film

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I'm will never know exactly why I picked up that roll of infrared.  Perhaps because I was going to Cambodia, and it seemed like it might be a good place to try it out. It was 2001, and I was clinging to film longer than most.  I took 10 rolls of my favorite Fujichrome Velvia 50, a few rolls of standard Kodak Black and White, and 1 roll of the now heartbreakingly discontinued Kodak HIE Infrared. 

Film was always a leap of faith- it was only after you returned that you would find out what had worked-  thousands of miles and hours between shooting and knowing the result.  There could be no reshoots.  No adjusting on the spot-  no shooting a hundred photos and deleting 99-  you had to choose carefully  (and I still ran out of film!)-  to focus yourself as well as the camera.  

Cameras, actually.  I carried two and devoted one entirely to the infrared-  so for every roll of color film, I might take just one shot of infrared, to make that one roll last for the entire trip.  It meant that I had to be choosy.  Which meant that in the end, I ended up liking more of the photos on that one roll than I ever had before.

You don't run of digital.  You don't have to carry bulking rolls of film around  (although you do need one camera dedicated soley to infrared, so you still have to explain the second camera).  You can check instantly to see if the photo works.  You can share pictures with people even before you return home.  I'd switch back to this film in a heartbeat, if ever they decided to make it again.

Climate Change

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Every year, I make a point to get to the nearby Botanic Garden to photograph the cherry blossoms and whatever else is blooming on that date.  This year, it was bluebells that caught my eye.  I can't help thinking that one day, years from now, this will be some sort of climactic data set-  as the camera recording not only the specific state of flower the blossoms are in, but also the date of that image.  In Brooklyn in 2016, May 8 looked like this:

Tune in next year.....

This is Not a Leaf

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This is not a leaf.

These are not leaves.

Nope.

If I had grown up Canadian, a leaf may have looked like this:

If I had grown up in the Caribbean, leaves may have looked more like this, and may have been called a fronds:

Coming from Chicago, fronds meant exotic always warm far away lands.  Coming from Chicago, a leaf could well have been an apple or an elm.  There was an elm in our yard that somehow survived when all the surrounding elms were done in by Dutch Elm disease in the 1960s and 1970s, and three apple trees-  a reminder that the land on which our house sat had once been something else.  A green orchard, turned into a grey suburb.

I think it was that it was the first leaf that appeared in the spring.   March has to be the dreariest month-  a monochrome world with none of the beauty of fresh snow lacing bare trees, nothing but mud and melting piles of black slush.  Sometime in every April-  the first tiny shards of impossible green stabbed through the grey and burned themselves into my brain.  The lilac.

Syringe vulgaris-  native to the Balkans, where they grow on rocky outcrops, and my front yard, where they separated our yard from our neighbor’s yard.  Say the word leaf, and my mind's leaf is always shaped like a lilac leaf. 

What is your leaf shaped like?  

What shade is your green?