My first sunset

Twenty years ago--August, 2004--I was fooling around with photographs, doing things that I never did before with what was, at least for me, a whole new technological world. I'd always loved photography, loved film, and whole afternoons in a basement dark room. I loved developing photographs in fixer baths. 

When I was in high school, I told my dad that I'd really like to go somewhere and study photography. He didn't like the idea. Taking pictures wasn't the kind of vocation he'd call a "kingdom calling." To his credit, he never really considered a photographer to be anything more than the guy who showed up at weddings and told people what to do, where to stand. 

I bought a good camera for the first time in 1976, but basically left it in a closet for many years, taking pictures of kids and family and not much more. My first digital camera was a weird thing, but then so was digital photography. I paid far, far more for it than it was worth--an ebay special. 

Then, I climbed the ladder. The camera I bought and began to use regularly was a Fujifilm, a honest-to-goodness real camera that delivered pictures like the decorated one above, with corn leaves so sharp and focused that they seem to walk into the room. 

This particular trip west of town happened at sunset. I rarely went out at the end of the day, but I remember thinking that what obsessed me back then, the awesome beauty of heavenly events I'd never really stopped to see, happened at other times. There was no reason to believe that sunsets might not offer eye-fulls of equally glorious skies. 

This August sunset proved a blessing.

In the shot above, the corn is itself a character in the story of the photograph, not just a feature of the setting. But other shots in the same folder illustrate how I was weighing the possibilities of the role of all that Iowa corn.

Here, it's farther away, hardly a role at all.

Here, even less. What I've got in the camera is a wonderful sunset, not a show-stopper, but not bad at all, and a huge Iowa cornfield. I liked being closer to the corn--that's why I chose the shot at the top of the page to turn into a marquee.

Two more. What I like about this one is the placement of the tree and the clouds, as if they were sweetly sharing the lead role. I like the grasses too.

In any retrospective of my time out in the country has to include this picture, which does not include a sunset or even a breathtaking sky. This shot is all land, but it remains, even 20 years later, a photograph that lines up with what I'd  consider the best of the best. . .I don't know why.

Just north of Lebanon, Iowa, August, 2004. This one is a keeper.