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 Cedar Grove Cemetery in Tennessee. I have a good many relatives buried on this hill. When I was a kid, there were huge cedar trees all over the place and "Cedar Grove" made sense. A few years ago, a tornado hit the cemetery and pretty much wiped out all the trees and knocked the little white church off its foundation. No one in the cemetery was injured. Well, some of them may have been injured but that was before the tornado. The church was rebuilt but it takes a while longer for the trees so a local artist did his part to add a little life to the now barren landscape. He took what was left of some of the trees and carved a pair of beautiful angels from that wonderful red cedar wood. Each around 10 feet tall. He carved them with a chain-saw! Wow! My dad has been telling me about them for a while but I hadn't had a chance to get up there to see them. Our visits to the area are always too short and there's too much else going on. The last time we visited though, we made time. My dad really appreciates good photos and he knew they would make a good subject, so we talked about the best time to shoot them. I knew what that meant and he was more than willing. We got up well before sunrise so we could make the drive and have time to look around for the best way to shoot them. (Turns out they're pretty far apart and I could only shoot one at a time.) It was 28 degrees and a light frost was on the ground when we got there. It took a little while for the sun to rise up over the Tennessee hills so we walked around for a bit, talking, looking at dates and names on headstones and checking out different angles for the angels. I pretty much knew this was going to be my setup when I saw it. Big angel up front with the little church up the hill. When the sun finally came over the trees, the church on the hill began to glow. Cool. Then it came up a little higher and hit the angel. The frost was also covering the wood and when the light hit it, the angel started to glisten. Cooler. I shot a lot of variations of this shot from slightly different positions as quickly as I could. After a very few minutes, the frost melted and the light was too bright. I shot a little more but it was all pretty flat compared to this. So my dad and I got up before dawn on a below freezing morning to drive to a cemetery to shoot the red angels. That's not weird is it? Posted by blbutler on February 9th, 2007 Archived under: Color, Places, Wordplay |
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