for queen anne in autumn

where i live, queen anne’s lace grows wild everywhere: along the sides of the road, in open fields, up and down the hills and valleys. i look forward to seeing its beautifully intricate blooms every year, which stand tall and stalwart above the other wildflowers. this is a photo i took in late autumn of last year, when i found one particularly resolute bloom still proudly smiling in the cold, even as the progression of seasons had begun to take the other plants around it. its face open, turned bravely towards the sun, it seemed to almost be offering itself to the inevitable order of nature. you can see the creep of decay in the background, shades of brown and deepening cold slowly moving in around it. yet, despite knowing what was to come, this one bloom remained standing strong in a sea of its dying sisters, dedicated to standing tall until its very last moment.

for harvest dawn

like many other photographers, i love the golden hour. there is something so delicately illuminating about this liminal time, when the sunlight becomes gentle and brings out transformations of color, shape, and shadow as we hover on the cusp of transition. this photo is a brief split-second capture of one such moment, the rising of a late-autumn sun over an aging field of summer grass.

initially, given the golden autumnal colors and the grain in the forefront of this photo, i thought of this as a harvest piece, but after sitting with it for a while, i found it actually felt more at home with the theme of “threshold”. the photo holds a moment of multiple transitions within itself: the coming of the dawn, the passage of seasons, and the hopeful golden light of the future that is to come. when looking at the piece, i hope that the viewer feels that they are standing in the doorway of possibility, looking out into the beautiful rising sun.

@cfieldswriting