Cumulus and other aerosols

Here in Arizona we typically have over 500 days of sunshine a year. The sky blazes blue and pure and relentless. It hurts your eyes, weighs on your shoulders, forces your head down. If you want to understand why Albert Camus’s Meursault commits a senseless murder in The Stranger, spend a summer day outdoors in Phoenix. People from Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio arrive in January to bask under this uninterrupted sky, but by April even they can’t take one more day of it. Sunrises and sunsets in Phoenix, where I live, depend on dust and pollution for any color, so most days begin in pale light and end with a cloudless whimper.

The challenge for me as a photographer is to live with the light I’m given. This means I must rise before dawn or head out after sundown or find a way to manage the harsh light, but most often it drives me inside to shoot.

My son-in-law who’s lived only east of the Mississippi, once asked me, “Don’t you miss clouds?” In a word, yes. In two, Hell, yes! When I lived in Washington, DC, overcast days were common, and so I got used to going out in the nearby parks or walking the streets knowing I’d have hours of diffused light.

Now, on our rare cloudy days, even on days the weather casters too generously call, “partly cloudy,” I’m itching to head outside, camera in hand. The harsh light we’re so used to evaporates on these days, the clouds forming a gigantic softbox over our heads. Colors become more saturated and shadows lose their sharp edges. It’s a pleasure to walk camera in hand, to wander “lonely as a cloud.”

I shot this one evening last week at the end of a three days of glorious rain, knowing that by morning we’d face another cloudless day.