I’m still processing photos from my trip to the Rio Chama last month. It was cloudy some of the time I was there, which limited me in some ways and helped in others. For example, I really like the diffuse light in the photo below.
If I’d included the sky in the scene, it would have shown up as bright white. Since our eyes are naturally drawn to the brightest part of an image, the sky would have distracted you, dear reader, from the areas that I deemed most important.1
Here’s another photo in which I excluded the sky. Had the sun been shining, I might actually have been thwarted in my quest for a workable photo. The interplay of light and shadow, which often seems so soft and nuanced to our eyes, often becomes extremely harsh once it’s been translated by a camera into a photo.
Both photos show chamisa2 in the foreground, in various stages of bloom. Chamisa has seemed especially spectacular to me this year, although I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a particularly good year for it — or maybe something in me changed.
I believe that photos, by their very nature, can’t possibly show any kind of objective truth. Truth disappears at the very moment a photographer chooses to include this and not that in a given scene.
Chamisa is called rabbitbrush in other western states.
an interesting piece of information to go with Chamisa.
The Zuni people use the blossoms "bigelovii" variety of the chamisa subspecies to make a yellow dye and use the stems to make baskets.