“Seeing the Light”
First Congregational United Church of Christ in Elkhorn, Wisconsin
April 5, 2024
Had I been thinking of posting photos on more than a week-by-week basis, I could have published this photo last week to coincide with Easter. The photo and its title ooze religious symbolism, so much so that I do not need to provide much of an explanation.
The steeple is on the First Congregational United Church of Christ in downtown Elkhorn, Wisconsin. When I decided to feature the photo and looked up the date when I made the photo, I was hoping it would have been on or close to Easter.
Sorry, the date is June 3, 2006, long after Easter lilies have faded and chocolate bunnies have been digested, for those embracing the secular. For the religious, they may be on the path to transformation that is professed by the Easter story, one that can be much more powerful than that of Christmas.
About the photo itself, its impact is the result of composition. With such a fantastic scene presenting itself, I did several shots in which I “moved” the steeple around in the viewfinder of my camera.
Almost 18 years on, I do not remember if I used more than one lens to vary the compositions. And, of course, I had options of cropping the image when I put the negative in my darkroom enlarger in pre-digital days.
As the result shows, I chose to isolate the steeple in the clear part of the sky instead of moving the steeple, especially the top with the cross, closer to the bright edge of the clouds. I did not embellish the darkness of the clouds, so a storm may have been in the offing or recently occurred. I do not remember.
Although this is not a sunrise or sunset, almost any sky photo is, in my view, one of the easiest to do in all of photography. The light metering, especially with automatic cameras, produces an image rendered technically excellent most of the time.
But, the trick to an effective sky photo – meaning interesting and unique – is the composition. Without the steeple, this photo would not be too significant, and I probably would not have published it.
When I was the editor of the start-up Lake Geneva Magazine for a year in the late 1980s, each issue featured reader-submitted photos spread over a few pages. Therefore, I looked at many sunrise, sunset, and general sky photos.
Most of the photos had dazzling colors and clouds, but the images started to look the same because they lacked that one element (such as the steeple in my photo) that would have made the photo distinctive and possibly conveyed some sort of story or symbolism to captivate the viewer.
Or, the photos had too many elements, which detracted from the impressive skies. As with most pursuits in life, photography has its fine lines to walk.
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