Last night at Huntington Beach, a young couple asked me to take their picture.
I told them I would, but only if they forgot I was there and went and watched the sunset. The girl asked what they should do. I said they were young and beautiful, the sunset was bold and beautiful, so they should go to the water’s edge and soak up that beauty. It took them a few moments to stop performing and lean into each other and that shore and that moment of light…and I captured the photograph the weekend had been teaching me to make without knowing it.
They are silhouettes. The sun is a small hard star beside him, compressed to a sunburst because I adjusted the aperture to make it behave. Her hair tips red where the light passes through. Behind them, the river mirrors a column of gold from the horizon, and off to the right two gulls sit on pilings, dark against light. Under the couple’s feet is a strip of sand so dark it reads almost black.
I sent them the photos, as promised. What they’ll never know is that in all that color that my mind was still shooting in monochrome as if flat, grey skies still engulfed the entire peninsula.
It was gray here for days. Overcast, flat, raining, with the sun hiding morning after morning. For a woman who chases the light, it was a famine. So, Saturday evening at Messick Point I did something I’d not have risked had photography mentors not suggested it. I took the color away. I shot Poquoson in black and white.
I was completely out of my element. I had no idea what would develop into a good shot. It was cold and spitting mist. I was paying attention to the gritty working part of Poquoson I’d usually pass by on my way to something prettier, photographing rusted crab pots and old work boats loaded with gear and a cross standing in the marsh and a flock of blackbirds swarming overhead. With no color to overshadow them, shape and texture and contrast rise instead.
The Lord’s day was flat gray again. Dare I? I did. I shot my beloved fishing pier at Yorktown Beach in black and white, too. I got to there early on purpose and sat for a full half hour before I lifted the camera at all. The river disappeared into the fog. The Coleman Bridge glistened. A heron stood alone in the vast emptiness. The sky was flat and gray, and so was I.
When the sun finally returned, I could see things in it that I could not see a week ago. The dark taught me how to look at the light. I would not have believed that was possible until drafting this post.
When I was photographing that couple, I was not only seeing the sun. I was seeing the texture in the clouds, the reflection in the water behind my subjects, and the dark band of sand holding the bottom of the frame. I was seeing birds on pilings as shape, not subject. I was thinking in light and dark while I was seeing in color. Something had fundamentally shifted inside me after twelve hours working in monochrome.
Two of my photographs made the news in the last week, which isn’t news in itself. It’s what they aired that mattered.
On Friday night while I was shooting an inspired sunset at Lion’s Bridge, News 3 aired my sunrise from the pier that morning. It was golden and pink with haze on a clear river, every bit of color I know how to chase, and a cruise ship slipping through the red glow at first light.
It’s right on brand for me, another gorgeous morning on the York River. Safe. Predictable. Stunning.
Last night? They aired one of the black and whites from Messick Point. I’d broken the rule of thirds on purpose to emphasize the enormity of the disrepair in the foreground, splitting the frame in half horizontally. It was the capture of those old workboats alongside crab pots on Back River beneath a sky pregnant with layers of clouds defined, varied hues of grey and a half-dead cypress holding the corner.
It’s the antithesis of my brand, a sunless night in the marshes of Poquoson. Uneasy. Industrial. Gloomy.
Same station. Same woman. One was made from all the color there is and the other from none of it, and apparently both of them were worth showing to people eating dinner in their homes. Dozens of golden sunrises and sunsets have made the news, but this one meant more than all of them together. I’d taken the second one on the coldest, grayest, least inspired evening in months, standing in a drizzle fearing I was wasting my time.
Sunday morning, Pastor Colin preached out of John 15 on abiding, and he gave us five signs that it is happening. We submit to pruning willingly. We bear fruit faithfully. We pray expectantly and take in Scripture consistently. We obey gladly. And we live joyfully.
I got stuck on the first one. Whatever we run to, he said, whatever we revere or worship more than God, those are the branches He takes away. He said God does not punish His children, that pruning is not punishment, that He clips the branches that were never going to bear fruit so new branches can grow which will bear much later.
I sat in that service and wept because I knew which branch He meant.
I hinged my dreams on a family. I knew that before it was gone. I spent my adult life believing I was not enough on my own, that I was an unfinished version of me until I had a household, a child, and a place at a table that would finally be real. And, then I had it. Three years of making dinner every night and running a house and belonging to people, and I was content; I stopped looking for anything else.
Including God, as painful as this is to realize. I did not stop believing. I stopped seeking. My world got very small and warm and ordered, and I loved it. It took up all the space. I did not see or need more. I certainly didn’t see the light in the rain clouds.
In the middle of that sermon, with rain coming down hard enough outside you could hear it on the roof, Colin said something almost in passing.
“God guides every raindrop.”
I had just spent four hours standing in those raindrops bookending the night before, in the mist and fog trying to find something worth savoring in a world void of color. And when he said it, I understood that the gray was not an interruption of the gift. The gray was the gift. God was not withholding the sun from me. He was guiding every drop of what fell instead, teaching me to see what’s beneath His glory.
He also told us about a husband who does everything for his wife and never actually talks to her, and said that is how we often love God. It is not productivity for Jesus that matters. It is proximity to Jesus. We speak to Him in prayer. He speaks to us in Scripture.
I have always prided myself on being very productive. But this year? I’m learning to extend my conversations with God beyond golden hour to the little hiccups in the middle of the day and the anxious toils that wake me in the night. It is a closeness I had not known when I was a wife.
On my desk sits a clear heart with a butterfly inside it, and on its wings are words with verses attached: Special. Chosen. Precious. Unique. Lovely. Strong. It was a Christmas gift from the marriage.
Admittedly, those words have been difficult to believe about myself. There’s a devil on the other shoulder, who once had a face, but now is just a voice that speaks a counter narrative. It is quieter than it was, but it is not gone.
Last night, however, standing in the cool sand with my camera ready, telling two kids to forget I existed and look at the sky, choosing the aperture and angle and moment, making something I could give away to people I will never see again… I was not reciting those words or arguing myself into them.
I felt them, all six, for about an hour. I had the warmth of the sun on my skin and the strongest sense of companionship I’ve had in months. There was no loneliness to hold off.
What the storms are showing me is that I am not chasing the sun. I never was, really, though it took me a year and a half and a very hard season to see it clearly.
I am chasing the source of it. The One who sets a sky on fire then swallows it in gloom then lays a ball of light down gently over a river while a beach full of people stop walking and stare. When the sun rises and sets, I am not working. I am walking with God.
Autumn whispers. The light leaves earlier each evening. I’ve had my first cold mornings already, and there will be much more gray between here and spring. I know what that does to me, what a dark season can cost.
But look again at that photograph of the couple. There is nothing in it the gray didn’t teach me. The sunburst, the shape of the birds, the dark band of sand under their feet. Every bit of it came out of a cold drizzle in Poquoson where I thought I was wasting my time.
I see God in the gold. I am learning to see Him in the gray. But that is not quite it either.
What I am actually learning is to see.
Eight months ago at six in the evening, I was in a kitchen with my back to the window, browning meat, and the sky was doing all of this without me. Last night, at about that time, a family somewhere sat down to dinner with the news on, and for a few seconds there was a gray marsh in Poquoson on the screen. I hope someone looked up and saw what I did.
