The Sunflowers of Winter

Dance to the sun . . .
A kiss to the earth . . .

This is the first year that they have let the sunflowers overwinter in their beds at Penn State's Arboretum. And it is strange to say, but I have visited them as much in winter as I did in summer when they were in full, colorful bloom (see here and here).

The birds loved them well into the late autumn and early winter, until the seeds were mostly spent. Some of my favorite moments of early fall included watching the goldfinches and the monarch butterflies visit the sunflower beds, which provide a rich source of food to all winged visitors.

Watching a baby goldfinch dance up and down on a sunflower head, begging to be fed, was one of the most charming moments of early autumn at the Arboretum. And when the baby's dance was rewarded in a sweet mother/child sunflower seed kiss, well that was pure bliss . . . (Hey, that rhymed. Maybe I should have written this as a poem!)

But winter's sunflowers have a very different sort of appeal. I like the bent, spare, gnarly shapes of them. I like the hoar frost that makes them sparkle on the coldest days. And I especially enjoy photographing them in black and white, against the morning sun.

As a photographer, I often return to some of the same haunts to try to perfect my craft. (And that is a sentence that I would have never thought I'd write. Me? My "craft"? Is it so? I guess it's so!) I have taken this photo or others similar to it, hundreds of times, waiting and watching for it to be somehow "right."

I took this approach as well, with the solar clock against the morning sun. If only you knew how many shots I took of that scene before posting the one I finally did, you might just about cry. Which is to say: hundreds and hundreds. But let me reassure you, I didn't mind at all; in fact, it felt like time well spent. But I digress . . .

Back to the sunflowers. I selected this particular shot because of the two bookend sunflowers, bent over, one on each side of the shot, with the sun lighting up the edges of that sunflower in the middle. A couple of very obliging little puffy white clouds came by to liven up the edges of the sky a bit.

People who see me working on some shots with my camera might think me the most prayerful photographer around, as much more of my work than you might suspect is accomplished kneeling on the ground, looking up. And so this particular morning found me sitting among the sunflowers, pretending perhaps to be one of them, as they bowed down to the morning sun.

The song: 10,000 Maniacs, with Among the Americans.