On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
Having worked at home even pre-pandemic, and being a homebody in general, I’ve spent many hours looking out my windows, watching Maine’s changeable weather, the days and seasons passing, and the endless play of light and shadow.
This long contemplation of one intimately familiar landscape makes me think that if I went to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, and woke up at some random hour on some random day, I would be able to tell you the time of year and the time of day to within a very small margin, from the foliage, the state of the fields, the length of the shadows, and the quality of the light.
It’s probably not true, and anyhow, the seasons are so clearly differentiated in Maine, it’s not much of a test. But that meditation in turn made me think about the sun’s path, and one day I realized (astronomers feel free to correct me) that the sun passes through any given point in the sky only twice a year – once on its way up to the summer solstice and again on its way down. Hence the shadows are different every single minute of every single day, even if the change from one day to the next is imperceptible. Never mind that living things constantly grow and change, so each maple tree’s shadow will reach a little further next year.
This is the background of my habit of taking lots of pictures of what seem to be the same scenes, over and over. You can never step into the same river twice….
Almost sunset, looking north
Behind the barn, looking south
Just after sunrise, an unusual light for me since I’m a night owl
Not long for this world
Loft
Space
Reflections
Early spring
eclare
The reflections photo is cool!
The Golux
I can almost smell the interior of that barn.
Betty
@The Golux: I was thinking I could smell early spring in the last one. So serene.
RedDirtGirl
Lovely! What part of Maine? I have family on MDI.
LiminalOwl
JanieM, thank you for the pictures and for your thoughts. I had never thought before about the shadows being different every day!
Wag
What an amazing meditation. I love the mysteries of the dark loft, as well as your reflections photo. Thank again for sharing your photos and home.
LiminalOwl
I learned today
from JanieM in BJ
that shadows shift daily
as the earth orbits the sun
and intersects light rays at different points.
Last week, as I read Babel-17,
a starship captain solved a navigation problem
with an understanding of geometry
as her ship orbited the earth
whose gravitational field
rayed out to the orbit’s foci
and rolled a child’s marbles.
And recently, in a news article
that a type of synesthesia
leads to perception of time in circular motion
so that synesthetes locate their memories
by seeing their timelines
as the years pass through.
The circles of knowledge are intersecting
as do my social circles:
perhaps this creates
the music of the spheres
and we are at most 180 degrees away.
OzarkHillbilly
Very nice photos and meditation JanieM, but that that barn looks suspiciously clean.
arrieve
A lovely set of pictures to do my morning meditations by. I’m a sucker for reflections, and it is one of the things that I take hundreds of pictures of, so I especially love that one. The paired windows make such a nice frame.
bluefoot
Thanks for these; they are beautiful. I love your comment about how you can tell time and place by the quality of light. It’s so true.
cope
Thank you for the soothing images. When I was in my arty photography phase in college, these are the kinds of shots I was always trying for but never quite got right. You got them right.
As for the passage of the Sun through the sky in the course of a year, it actually doesn’t follow the same path coming and going. It’s a complicated concept that can be explained with an analemma. As the Wiki shows, the location of the Sun at any particular time of the day through the sky over a year traces out a figure eight, an analemma. You have probably seen analemma represented on a globe and wondered what the hell that thing is. When I was still teaching astronomy, I always wanted to do a project where a rod or stick is planted firmly in the ground and have my students go out every day at the same time and mark the end of the stick’s shadow. The effect would be analogous to those pictures of the Sun taken at the same time every day during a year’s time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma
JanieM
[ETA: piled one comment on top of another and created confusion. Hopefully this will come out right.]
Thanks to everyone — a few responses now that I’m out of bed.
@The Golux:, @Betty: I’m with you on the smells. The barn definitely has its own reminiscent scent, no matter how many years it has been since this land was farmed. It includes the aroma of old wood, of course. And springtime has a glorious smell around here, I suppose mostly emanating from the ground as it thaws.
@RedDirtGirl: I live not too far from Augusta, in what the Kennebec Land Trust has informally dubbed “The Kennebec River and Lakes Region,” aka central Maine.
@LiminalOwl: Nice poem! It *is* an intriguing thing to think about the shadows, and the sun’s path.
@OzarkHillbilly: Possibly you missed the backstory. The barn — actually the property in general — is my ex’s hobby. The barn houses a woodshop, a smaller shop, a weight room, a full-length basketball court, a kids’ playhouse, a room where the guys from “big guy basketball” used to sit around and drink beer, and an endless amount of storage and junk-collecting space. And yes, it’s about as clean as anyone could expect given the uses that are made of it, and the limited human resources there are to keep it tidy and (sort of) clean.
@eclare: @arrieve: I love reflections too. There will surely be more of them in my BJ posts as time goes by.
@cope: Thanks for the analemma link. I’ve already got a headache from trying to follow it….
When I was a teenager I thought I wanted to be an “astronomer,” though what I really wanted to be was an astrophysicist or cosmologist and think about cool stuff like black holes, the Big Bang, and the expansion of the universe. I took a half-credit course first semester in college that was just planetary astronomy, and … it gave me a headache. :-)
Ended up studying literature.
JanieM
PS — Thanks as always to Steve from Mendocino for editing the pictures. They’re a joint production.
cope
@JanieM: Well, the upshot of the analemma stuff is that your instincts were correct that shadows every day of the year are slightly different. The exceptions are the two days when the path of the Sun crosses the figure eight of the analemma at the same point in the sky.
Thanks again for the calming pictures.
TheOtherHank
In the just after sunrise picture, what is the vehicle to the right of the van?
JanieM
@TheOtherHank: It’s a scissor jack. Long story….if I get time I’ll explain its presence a little later. There’s never a dull moment around here.
TheOtherHank
@JanieM: Thank you for the quick response. I was never going to figure that out. I stared at it for a while, it’s not a tractor… It’s not a pickup with a lumber rack…
dnfree
@cope: When my daughter took astronomy and photography (combined class) when she was a senior in high school, the instructor sent them out to the same location every day at the same time to take a photo. You could clearly see how the location of the sun changed over the semester. It was a great lesson (from a revered local physics teacher).
dnfree
Thank you so much for sharing the beautiful photos, and the backstory. One of my favorite places to visit in childhood, in the 1950s, was my grandparents’ dairy farm in Iowa. The barn was considerably less clean, but a fascinating place to play.
cope
@dnfree: There is another classic astronomy project in which students make a pin hole camera from an empty can or film canister and place it where it can track the Sun’s path through the sky every day for some long period of time, say a semester. The result is a series of bright lines across the photo paper showing that the Sun’s path is slowly rising or sinking over time depending on the season. Sadly, I never had my students do that one either.
cope
Hmmm, couldn’t edit previous comment to add a link to a good explanation and pics.
https://www.alternativephotography.com/solargraphy-catching-the-suns-path-pinhole-camera/
JanieM
@cope: Thanks for that link, those curves are beautiful! That’s the kind of image I was groping for, not the analemma framing. But my mental image was cruder — i like being reminded of how the curves slope.
JanieM
@TheOtherHank: A smaller scissor jack originally came to live here to help in snow removal; there’s a roof gully where ice dams build up and can cause leakage and expensive-to-fix damage indoors. It turns out that on a property where the projects never end, a scissor jack comes in handy in a variety of ways.
way2blue
Very cool. You have a great eye for engaging geometrical patterns & juxtapositions.
stinger
Goodbye, red door!
What wonderful photos.