Adobe and fresh snow are a magical pair. The tufts of fluff attach themselves to the rough spots on the mud and straw plaster as if magnetically drawn. Darts of snow, snowflakes driven diagonally down, punctuate the quiet and bring a layer of complexity to the scene. Even the splotches of wet snow on the camera lens bring vitality to the scene below.
Two miles southeast of the Martinez Hacienda featured in last week’s post resides the most photographed building in the Southwest if not the whole country. Paul Strand and Ansel Adams portrayed the handsome San Francisco de Asis in the 1920s and 1930s and every tourist with a point and shoot camera or smartphone gets their record shot. Having made several thousand shots on, say, fifty occasions I can attest to the challenge of rendering something special. Lenny Foster, late of Taos and now of St. Augustine, managed two doozies, one of the back of the church with crows in flight and another from atop a crane for a remarkable vantage point. My alleged best have been of details of the doors, crosses, canales and, especially, the buttresses taking center stage today.
To me the fine coating of wet snow on the accents the sensuous
curves of the buttresses.
Posts
2 comments:
Beautiful! Are you out shooting this morning?
Once again, lovely, lucious images of the famous Ranchos church. It is wonderful that it is still a functioning, active church, and the congregation and community members support the upkeep of it, including traditional mudding. The mix of mud with straw is like velcro for snow, and you captured and rendered it beautifully. A delight for this snowy morning in the southern Rockies.
Post a Comment