Tree Shadows

By G. E. Shuman

Our daughter, Emily, is a photographer. She’s not a professional photographer, (at least, not yet,) but she is, truly, on her way to becoming one. Emily just seems to live for pictures and pixels, images and designs, graphics, ‘gig’s’ and anything else that relates to transferring her own optical creations from a camera, disk or stick-drive to a computer, and then onto face book, email, or photo paper. I don’t pretend to understand all of that.

I really love how interested Emily is in our natural, and sometimes unnoticed world. We will be driving along on some snowy day, (Not that those are uncommon lately.) and she will just remark to me about some sight, some scene, some spot along the road that intrigues her. I like scenery as much as anyone, but when I’m on the way to work, or to church, or to the store, I am on a mission, and it isn’t a mission of world-exploration. To Emily, it truly is.

I can’t tell you the number of times this sharp-eyed, sharp-minded photographer-type person has asked me to stop the car so that she could snap an image of some amazing scene that just happens to be glaring right at us, from right beside a road we have traveled a thousand times before. I guess that’s what makes a good nature photographer. I do know that it is helpful, if, at that particular time, such a photographer-person has a good ‘natured’ driver.

With all of our recent winter weather, Emily has just become acutely aware of snow scenes, wind-created sculptures, and other ‘accidental’ examples of beauty all around us, and always wants to capture it on, (no, not film) but on some infinitesimally small area of the digital memory chip inside the postage stamp-sized plastic chip-holder inside her camera. (Today’s technology scares me a little, just as yesterday’s technology scared my dad a little.)

As I said, Emi is all about scenes and images. She can take something that I would chalk up to a random winter snow storm effect, and turn it into a visual feast; a masterpiece of sun, shadow, sparkle and sculpture. I have no idea how she sees a scene and deems it worthy of ‘capture’ in her camera, but she does. Some of her work is truly amazing. Just last week she insisted that I stop the car so that she could snap a picture of the ‘shadow’ of a tree on the snow. I don’t even remember precisely where we were. I do remember that Emily spotted this ‘spot’, and that I needed to stop to let her capture the moment, which, on that particular day, I was happy to do.

Tree shadows on the snow are fleeting things, you know, and are fully dependent on timing, illumination, and our ability to observe, and to appreciate them, before they are gone. In this, they remind me of the as-fleeting moments with our children, as they express themselves to us in their own, brilliant ways. Tree shadows are things that kids notice, as adults speed past on their way to more important things. But tree shadows, like the thoughts and vividly-expressed feeling of our children, are important. I know this because Emily observed one of those shadows, one of those moments, and decided to keep it. It could be that I need to pay more attention to important things like tree shadows… and the fact that my daughter likes to share them with me.