this is not a list

I’ve been sifting through three years worth of photos over the past couple weeks, thousands of photos just sitting on my hard drive in countless folders. I’m telling you, I could stop snapping for a year and still have pictures to share.  So I’ve begun the painstaking task of organizing them, ditching the bad ones and tagging the rest.  There are photos of places and people and landscapes and cities and objects and nature and sunsets and moon rises from Nova Scotia to Barcelona. And it’s time to get that shit under control, yo!

One of the things I am noticing as I go through these photos, aside from the staggering number of them, is the quality of the light from one place to the next. Indeed, the light in Montreal is quite different from the light in Paris, London, Rome and Barcelona.  Barcelona is zesty, as if a citrus mist or a thin veil of golden pollen hangs in the air. Italy bathes in honey apricot liquid light. Paris is less porous, less airy. It exhales in brown, in a way that suggests a soupcon of sepia. California’s sun is strait out of the cyan seventies. Nova Scotia is saturated in sea foam whereas British Columbia’s aura is fern & forest green.  As for the light that falls on Montreal… I haven’t quite figured it out yet.  Perhaps because I am too close to it.

But my favorite light so far, by far, has to be that of London. It feels like the same light that was there three hundred years ago. A light from another time. A light dipped in silver then draped over the buildings and parks and streets. It has a steel hue to it, a blue tint, a hint of flint. It is a dozen shades of gray even on a sunny day.  It is the color of winter no matter the season. And it lends itself oh so well to photography.

So in favor of basking in London’s glorious light, this week’s list is postponed to Saturday (the other reason being that I am disorganized and prone to procrastination).

See you Saturday. Until then, I wonder… what kind of light shines over you?