For the past 20 years my wife, Marianne, and I have spent part of every summer on the Cape Cod. For me the Cape has been a place to recharge my batteries, read summer mysteries and watch my children grow up. Making summer pictures has also been a big part of vacationing for me. As I have said, it’s all about light. My summer ritual has been to wake before sunrise, my eyes still full of sleep— coffee in hand—and find that perfect spot for an early morning picture.
Many summer mornings, however, I have gone out and waited and the wonderful early light never arrived. It might have been because of rain or too much fog. It might have been because, at that perfect moment, a cloud covered the sun or the moon. There is a Zen to sunrise shooting; it’s hard to know what to expect. And remember, being a weatherman is the only job in the nation where you can be wrong 50% of the time and still have a job.
Provincetown, with its beautiful light, is a common destination for my camera. For 20 years a series of small cottages just outside of town that the locals call the flower houses were the subject of camera journeys. At sunset the light is often breathtaking but the little cottages lost their quiet, understated charm under a mask of cars and people milling about, beer in hand. No, these small houses had to be photographed at sunrise or earlier at moonset when the locals were tucked in their beds. For years I tried and failed to make the image that was in my head. For one reason or the other, the weather or the light conspired against me.
I use Nikon cameras and for the most part a tripod is a heavy piece of equipment that I often leave in the trunk of my car. As it happened that morning, I didn’t have my tripod. As my wife and I approached the flower houses we saw the moonset of a lifetime. The moon was so large that it seemed to fill the western sky while from the east the sun rose like a phoenix from the sea. It was the image I’d been waiting 20 years to make and I didn’t have a tripod to steady my camera for the long exposure. With quick thinking on my wife’s part, she offered to let me use her shoulder as a make shift tripod and the result is the Moonset picture. Twenty years in the making.
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I came back into contact with John in the most random way last week... John and his lovely wife walking down the sidewalks of Katonah, me and a few friends enjoying cigars outside the town smoke shop. I had the pleasure of working with -- more like, studying under -- John on some magazine projects, and my office still displays, proudly, a b/w image of Ali John captured in the gym in the lead up to the first Frazier fight. Sometimes you get lucky and get to share space with people who operate at the top of their craft, even for a little while. That's how I view the time working with John.
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