Joanne Mason Photography

Tina (Travels and Trifles) challenges us this week to post photographs depicting ephemera. I can’t do better than the image above. When we see a spectacular sky such as this (photographed in Sydney, Australia), how long have we got to enjoy it? 10 minutes? A half-hour? An hour? No, it’s certainly gone in an hour, if not much earlier. Is it the color or the patterns that make this sky spectacular? Maybe, to a degree. But most of the mystery, the sacredness, if you will, of a sky like this is its evanescence.

I think the most glorious time for trees is in springtime, just when the first blooms and the baby leaves are popping out. Nature creates, I think, a work of art, with young greenery and branches laid out against the sky. But, alas, it’s so short-lived. So ephemeral. Come back in a week or two and it won’t look like this. In three weeks or four (less if there’s a spring storm), this beautiful picture will be completely gone.

It’s the same with the flowers of early spring. Consider this beautiful spring scene. It’s lovely now. But the flowers on the tree will soon lose their shape, their color; they begin to droop, and fall off, making way for the more mature leaves to grow out.

And similarly the flowers of this magnolia tree.

I confess, when I read and reflected on Tina’s challenge, I had actually never considered the ephemeral nature of things during years of photography. I shot pictures of beautiful things, moving things, inspiring things, thought-provoking things, without ever considering how short-lived things might be. I’ll certainly think about it more from here on.

And then I thought, well, the act of taking a picture is itself pretty ephemeral. The shutter’s open for, what, 1/60th of a second, maybe less. That exposure is pretty short-lived. Take the picture again, it probably won’t be the same. Maybe not even close. The essence of photography, the magic of photography is precisely that we are able to capture, and preserve, a moment.

So I offer this image. It’s a coastal meadow, filled with grasses of every shape and texture. I have edited the photo to create a more impressionist image.

The meadow, at that point in time, is a unique thing. Even if I tried, I could not photograph the same meadow twice. And I could not recreate the same edited image, no matter how hard I tried. The meadow exists at a unique moment in time, as does the edited impressionist image.

Thanks to Tina for a most stimulating challenge. I enjoyed thinking about photography and ephemera. I enjoyed gathering these few images. Next week, it will be Egidio’s turn to issue a challenge. (Interested in learning more about the Lens-Artists challenge? Click here .)