First Snow

Snow behaves nothing like stone or water. It does not wait for the light to land on it and then release a rim or a reflection — it seems to hold the light through its whole depth and give a portion of it straight back, so that a field on a clear night can look nearly as bright as the sky it is sitting under. Twenty-two minutes was enough here, less than half the time the first two plates needed.

This was an early fall snow, thin and unsettled, the kind that does not last the week. I went out the first clear night after it fell because I wanted the grain still sharp and ungranulated by thaw. The plate shows a single low rise with no trees, no fence line, nothing to break the curve — I wanted the eye to have nowhere to go but the light itself, and the small cold points scattered across the foreground, which are not stars but ice crystals catching the exposure at an angle.

By the half-moon marked on this plate, the room had settled into its rhythm: one subject fully understood before moving to the next, one exposure long enough to be honest and no longer.