Left the library at 8pm tonight, ready to head straight home and have dinner. Immediately after leaving the building however, I was struck by how beautiful the sky was. Mid and late summer skies always seem so immense and magical to me. The sun was rolling down fast, casting long mandarin shadows on everything, so I hurried up with my bicycle to catch it. After a few blocks of frantic peddling, I realized that I would never quite "catch" the sun. Sure, it is millions of miles away, so there's that. But all I wanted was a clear picture. Freeze the way its light came cascading through the dense cloud layers, peeping behind them like some terrifyingly large orange shirt button straining beneath the interlocked fingers of an obese diner.
This is the best I came up with.
I couldn't get to a place high enough where the visual debris of the city wouldn't obscure the setting sun. I was forced to incorporate this light/power/telephone pole in the composition. The sky is now a moderately appealing background to a picture of a city appliance. I realized on my way to the grocery store after this whole incident that if I wanted a really nice picture I would have had to stand atop the overpass on the Wooster St. highway 75 junction. No thanks.
It made me think back to the summer of 2007, when I was living with my parents in Cottage Grove Minnesota. I used to take my dad's scooter out on the country
backroads in the evening and catch pictures of the sky from the roadside.
And these were taken in Yellowstone National Park.
I had a dream once where the sky was the living inside of a giant eyelid. I could jump in the air hundreds of feet, yet I felt like I was not a single inch closer to the inside edge of that vast gently curving surface.
This all got me thinking of living in the city. Bowling Green is not even much of a city at 30,000 people, but it still offers a continuously restrictive view of the sky:
powerlines, buildings, antennas, satellite dishes, road signs and billboards.
Sometimes, in the height of a particular season, I'll be struck with an almost disturbing need to
consume it through my senses until I'm so stuffed with its sensory richness I'd have to lay back and vomit. In the fall I want to gorge on the smell of falling leaves and the crisp bite of cold air in my nostrils. I suppose summer is a feast of big skies.
I couldn't get to a place high enough where the visual debris of the city wouldn't obscure the setting sun. I was forced to incorporate this light/power/telephone pole in the composition. The sky is now a moderately appealing background to a picture of a city appliance. I realized on my way to the grocery store after this whole incident that if I wanted a really nice picture I would have had to stand atop the overpass on the Wooster St. highway 75 junction. No thanks.
It made me think back to the summer of 2007, when I was living with my parents in Cottage Grove Minnesota. I used to take my dad's scooter out on the country backroads in the evening and catch pictures of the sky from the roadside.
And these were taken in Yellowstone National Park.
I had a dream once where the sky was the living inside of a giant eyelid. I could jump in the air hundreds of feet, yet I felt like I was not a single inch closer to the inside edge of that vast gently curving surface.
This all got me thinking of living in the city. Bowling Green is not even much of a city at 30,000 people, but it still offers a continuously restrictive view of the sky: powerlines, buildings, antennas, satellite dishes, road signs and billboards.
Sometimes, in the height of a particular season, I'll be struck with an almost disturbing need to consume it through my senses until I'm so stuffed with its sensory richness I'd have to lay back and vomit. In the fall I want to gorge on the smell of falling leaves and the crisp bite of cold air in my nostrils. I suppose summer is a feast of big skies.
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