Trust Me. It’s a Junkyard

I don't shoot many landscapes. My eye tends toward people, moments, things with a heartbeat. But every now and then the light does something so unreasonable that you'd have to be a fool not to stop.

This is one of those.

I call them twenty-minute days. The window between dark and full morning when the light is doing something it won't repeat — not later that day, not tomorrow, maybe not ever again in quite that combination. Twenty minutes, sometimes less. You either have your camera, or you don't. I always had mine during those days.

This was shot from a side road near the Valencia Highway Patrol station, looking out over a farmer's field. I was standing in a junkyard. Tin cans, scrap metal, the general wreckage that accumulates at the edges of working land. The ground fog was covering all of it, turning the junk into something that looked like a painting of the world before anyone had made a mess of it yet.

The tree didn't care about any of that. It just stood there in the mist with the sun burning through behind it, doing what trees do.

I know it was a Monday in March. I know this because on the Sunday before, I had been considerably less than gracious with God about the fact that I hadn't gotten a good image in a long time. I wasn't subtle about it. I let Him know exactly how I felt.

Monday morning, this was waiting for me twenty minutes from my house. In fact, I even went the wrong way when looking for access to the ground fog opportunity. Light changes quickly at this time of day, especially when fog burns off.

I have learned to be careful about what I complain about.

This photograph is hanging on my wall. Several of these are. My wife has opinions about how many more will fit in my office. She is not wrong. I hang them anyway.