Some Saturday mornings just about all I can find out here on so much flatland is a broad morning sky--which is not to say that a broad morning sky, one as multi-hued as this one, is chopped liver. This one was an immense kaleidoscopic showpiece.
I sometimes think of landscape photography out here on the plains as if a what I record is a story. In this broad world, sky is always basically setting, like this. It's what's always there--a big, colorful dawn.
But really good stories require more than setting, right? So what goes in front of that an immense morning sky is character. That's what I think. That's what I look for. Sadly, this morning I couldn't find a character, just couldn't.
Okay, what you notice here is a single silo, no barn, no house--the morning sun is rising on something that, well, used to be. Hey, that's both character and story. But calling that silo a character is a stretch, isn't it? Really, all there is, here too, is setting. Glorious setting, but not much more.
Because the disappearing cloud layer just above the farmstead seems somehow to mimic what's beneath it, I thought this one might get me there. What do you think?--is there character in this one? I like the farmstead and the wispy fragments above it, but is it really "character"? Not really. But my word, it's a wonderful setting.
I had some hopes for this one, but last year's brome grass, a not-native species on top of it, is hardly striking. There's just not enough there there to be a character.
This morning, setting, breath-taking setting, was the whole huge story.
I'm not beefing. I could have done worse because conflict or not, the morning's glory was immense. The heavens declare, the psalmist says, which makes a dawn like this one into something of a preacher.
I can live with that. This morning, out north of Sanborn, I probably didn't create a story, but I was there in the pew for one remarkable sermon.
