Same place. Same time.

Sixty years ago, my dad, smilingly, made it clear that to him, my being a photographer wasn't exactly what he was thinking about when considering a path for his son's life. It was clear to me--I might have been 14 or so--that to him, being a photographer wasn't really a calling. It may well have been a job, but Dad was thinking of more worthy professions--say, preaching or teaching or becoming a medical missionary, "kingdom callings," he might have labeled them.

I don't regret listening to him. Besides, I am certainly among those who would say everyone should have at least one hobby or activity that's undertaken with zero regard for compensation, something you do only because you enjoy it. For me, photography has been that passion. 

I don't do it as often I used to, and there are reasons for that; but the harvest stays here, a couple thousand digital files that record a search that got me out of the house on countless Saturday mornings to try to capture something of rare beauty. 

That's ambitious out here where I live. Northwest Iowa has some of the best dirt in North America if you're raising corn or soybeans, but it doesn't attract many agog tourists. In all the mornings I spent on gravel roads and fence lines, I never, ever ran into another camera bug. Not once. 

So this morning I thought I'd haul some files out of that auxiliary hard drive and put a few up here. These were taken right about now--note the sunflowers--in 2007, 15 years ago, on a patch of ground six or seven miles west of Sioux Center, Iowa, just off Dogwood Avenue, a place that always offered strong images. 

The shot at the top is dark, but I needed to darken it a bit to get the personality of the sky because sky is always a character in photographs taken in this corner of the world. Montana rightly calls itself "Big Sky country," but ours aren't puny and they're often dramatic, especially this time of year.  

I was reared in a deeply evangelical home, which means an image like the one below somehow takes on a religious character. That broken cottonwood may well be nothing more than a tree whose time has come and gone, but to me for some reason it morphs strangely into a cross, the cross, even in its brokenness.

This shot is not as "Iowa" as the shot at the top of the page, because its distinct features aren't at all important. Because its immediacy is less accessible, it feels more distinctly universal, and because it does, the theme or idea of the photograph becomes far more important than what it records. The viewer plays a greater role in its appreciation. 

Same day. Same place. Same time. I think it may be the way the sun catches that barn roof off in the distance that makes this shot sing, at least in my book. The composition includes that tired tree, beaten by prairie seasons, and a grey, moody sky that can't quite decide to admit the sunshine that will soon eat it up. No corn here--or no corn anywhere near, so the grass, the region's most honored historical figure, seems, for once, front and center. Finally, that shining barn roof way out in the distance demands attention and brings to the foreground, oddly enough, an Iowa farm. In our library we have a small print of this shot in an unlikely ornate frame. But there's something sort of Hudson River School about this shot, something almost 19th century. It looks wonderful in an ornate, baroque-looking frame.

I don't need to say "same time, same place." You're getting to know these characters. A different angle here, and a portrait format to catch the height of this old cottonwood. One tree is completely broken, the one in the foreground is simply beaten up, but together they tend to feature a sky whose colors are not at all extraordinary, but somehow stunning. 

Right here beside me is a 30x40 canvas print of this shot that's just plain gorgeous. You can't always tell which photographs will be great when they're enlarged to that size, but this one turned out far, far better than I would have guessed.

That day, 15 years ago, not every shot I took turned out to be memorable. Never do. Here are some others--again, same place, same day, same time.

It was a morning when the sky wanted to make its own demands.

This isn't a stunner, but it's Iowa altogether--the stream, the maturing corn, the razor's edge of horizon, the beat up trees, the long grass and the myriad sunflowers. I didn't grow up here, and I didn't grow up on a farm, but there's something about this one--maybe it's the sky but its probably the corn--that makes me feel like home.

It's late August, and you can't not try to feature those sunflowers. They're everywhere. They may well be of no greater value than a field of dandelions, but amid the row crops and the all the earth colors, they speak their own bright language. 

One of the finest bits of advice I've ever been given is practical and wise: "Turn around." All the shots you've seen above were taken looking east and north. Right before I left, I turned around. This is what I saw. It's no masterpiece, but those lines are simply beautiful.

Whether or not Dad was right theologically, I'll let others argue. But let me just say that I don't regret at all my forty years in a classroom.