civilized ku # 941 ~ high water / terrible beauty

Main Street bridge / raging river ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenA while back, John Linn commented:

I notice that many of your pictures are taken under gray overcast (a reality in upstate New York I know). I am attracted to golden hour conditions when possible, and a bit of blue in the sky. Does this mean I am not capturing "real"?

Making pictures in the "golden hour" does not necessarily void the idea of picturing / representing "the real". IMO (and that of Sleepy LaBeef), it ain't what you eat, it's the way how you chew it.

Or, in other words, as long as your diet isn't entirely made up of sweets, and as long as you chew your food thoroughly, it ain't gonna kill ya.

Or, yet again (in picture making words), as long as you haven't turned making pictures in the golden hour into a fetish, and as long as you treat the golden hour light honestly - no pumping up the color saturation up to 11, there is no reason I know of that prevents you from capturing / picturing the real.

In truth and in the real world, there actually is a "golden hour" during which the light can be quite "golden". Although, the actual color temperature of the light during the golden hour can vary considerably depending upon atmospheric conditions, geographic location, and other factors.

What makes me crazy about many, if not most, golden hour pictures, is: 1) the utterly predictable propensity for making very unrealistic color saturated pictures thereof. Pictures that bear absolutely no resemble to reality and are, in fact, 2) deliberately made to be so - most often over and over again to the point of picture making exclusivity by "chasing the light"/"light chasers" picture making simpletons - in order to maximize the "wow" factor.

This fetishistic proclivity gives pictures made during the golden hour a ubiquitous sameness that totally obfuscates the often uniquely different and subtle color qualities to be found at differing geographic locations and under differing atmosphere conditions. Differences and subtleties that are genuinely distinctive / unique as well as beautiful. But, unfortunately, differences and subtleties that are heavy-handedly hamfisted into mass-appeal dreck.

All of that said, I am neither immune to the appeal of nor the making of "honest" or truthful golden hour pictures. Just yesterday, I left the house during early golden hour - a deliberate decision - to make pictures of our local flooding. In part, that was to foster my intent to make pictures of terrible beauty. Pictures of visual beauty that belie the actual terribleness of the depicted referent.

In any event, a few of my early "golden hour" terrible beauty pictures are posted here and in the following 2 entries. IMO, they all capture "the real".