The Corona Diaries Vol. 36: Just look at that chiaroscuro!

(mid-September 2021)

Over the summer I heard that Kodak had started making Super 8 motion picture film again. This news inspired me to have my student film, which was shot on Super 8, digitized. And so I dug around the attic until I found the tin and blew off the dust before taking it to a digitization studio a nice bike ride away.

I don't recall my final grade on it – it was probably a C+ – but I do recall the gist of the instructor's comments. He remarked that my cinematography was very good and he singled out the lens flares, such as you see above, for praise.

But he gave my screenwriting a D- or a D--. And deservedly so. The movie is about the internal struggles of a young man but they're never identified. The generic trials and tribulations of young adulthood, I guess. It seems that I had been watching a lot of Akira Kurosawa films at the time because I put a sword fight into the story.

I like the look of this shot, especially how the scene is broken up into alternating areas of light and shadow. Notice how the combatants' costumes match the setting. Maybe I got a B- after all.

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On Labor Day I got up early and was out the door and on my bike before the dawn. The sun peeked over the horizon as I cruised down the bike path. It was about 50 degrees out so I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in months and it felt a bit odd. My ride would take me east to Cottage Grove, a town of 7,000 people or thereabouts, albeit circuitously. I found the route at the website of a local bicycle manufacturer but tweaked it so that I started and ended at my house instead of the company's store out in Mall Wasteland on the northeast side of town. Total distance would be somewhere in the 20-25 mile range.

As I made my way southeast, the landscape changed from urban to suburban to rural. The countryside was foggy and the mist was especially thick in the low-lying areas which made for some picturesque scenes.

There was very little traffic, thankfully, so I was able to hear the birds. Over the course of my ride I saw four hawks but I was unable to get a decent photograph of even one. By the time I noticed them and had finished fumbling with my camera, they were off to find another perch far away from the human. I got a good enough glimpse of a couple of them, however, to tell that they were of the red-tailed variety. But there were plenty of other animals to be seen who were not completely unhappy to have their picture taken.

I rode by several stables and saw many horses.

These 2 were mildly intrigued by the thing at the fence and stopped eating to stare at me. They weren't sleek like the racing horses of my imagination nor did they appear to be large enough to count as draft horses either, if my memory of Budweiser commercials was anything to go by. Then again, I am not familiar with the equestrian world. Still, those large caliber hooves would do some damage should I be in their vicinity when they got irritated.

Seeing them brought the song "Heavy Horses" by Jethro Tull to mind.

As the sun crept farther up the sky, I was able to get more nice photographs of the foggy landscape but with a more refulgent feel including this one where I made use of shade not unlike my movie. Look at that chiaroscuro! This photo reminds me of Days of Heaven. Néstor Almendros and Terrence Malik would be proud.

I was also able to capture beams of light radiating from between tree branches. It was a lot harder to get these shot right than you'd think. The camera has to be at just the right angle and just the right distance away.

While pedaling along one road, I noticed an abandoned farmhouse with some large birds walking next to an outbuilding which I thought were turkeys. I cruised up the the gravel driveway and, upon closer inspection, I discovered that they were peafowl. Just as with the hawks, they took off before I could get a snap, scurrying behind a delipidated barn and presumably into the adjacent field which once held corn but was now an example of prairie restoration.

Less than a quarter mile down the road I looked up a long driveway and spied a couple more of them heading away from me. At the top of a small hill in the distance there were even more. There must have been 6-8 of them just casually making their way to a stand of trees at the edge of a field. (A genuine muster!) I've never seen more than 1 peafowl at a time so this was pretty exciting stuff. A farm cat appeared on the top of the hill and it lazily approached the group which was growing as a few more trickled in from the field of what I think was soybeans to see what all the hubbub was about. None of them had large tails but I am unsure if this was because they were all peahens or if peacocks shed their tails after mating season.

There was one hill on my route which was fairly steep in addition to being rather long and I nearly met my end during the ascent. After finally reaching the top, I stopped to pant and curse myself again for not having packed water. Looking at the road ahead, I saw a doe in the distance staring at me. When I got home and looked at my photos, I found that there were, in fact, 2 of them.

In addition to fauna, there was the flora. Unsurprisingly, corn was to be seen all along my route.

But I also came across a farm that grows hops.

Just north of the hops was a corn field filled with Sandhill cranes. I looked it up. A group of cranes is a sedge.

At one point, a pair flew in from the south which got a couple of the ones on the ground squawking. Before long 2 pairs took off and flew out of sight. I stayed long enough to notice that this routine was repeated a few minutes later. Perhaps this is how they motivate one another to migrate south. "Hey dummies! It's Labor Day. Time to head down to Mexico!"

This being America's Dairyland, of course I saw oodles and oodles of cows on my ride including this bull who got a bit antsy with the human.

Not long after I moved to Wisconsin, I was tricked into hopping a fence into a pasture one day. My newfound friend neglected to tell me that it was home to a bull who happened to be out of sight at that moment. Well, the field's inhabitant must have smelled teenager because he eventually came around to investigate. He fixed me with a gimlet eye before his demeanor made it obvious to me that my new bovine companion would brook no humans on his turf and he began to run towards me. I ran in the opposite direction and hopped that fence in record time!

While I am on the subject of things country folk do to city folk, I want to note that more than one person gave me the BS hunting story that goes something like this:

They run out of ammo or their shotgun is otherwise put out of commission so they climb a tree with their knife at the ready should a deer walk underneath it. Then, in what must have been the worst bit of luck ever, they lose their knife just as the biggest buck they've ever seen walks below them. In an act of manliness worthy of Ernest Hemingway himself (or desperation), they drop down on top of the unsuspecting beast and kill it with their bare hands.

Now that fall is right around the corner, the animal landscape will be changing soon. Heck, it probably is already. All of the herons I've seen on my walks and bike rides will be leaving soon. As will those hummingbirds that never bothered to come to my feeder despite me filling it with premium nectar! Blue jays and cardinals stick around during the winter as do rabbits, mice, and opossums. I will have to look into this further and perhaps make an effort to see more wildlife this winter.

One last photograph from the ride.

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Bonus photo! One recent evening I went to a local restaurant and put in an order. Since it would be 20+ minutes before it was ready, I decided to stroll the neighborhood. Before long I discovered that the sidewalk on a nearby street had various quotes on the pavement, including this one. How ironic to pave over the land and then stamp the words of Aldo Leopold on it.