A Day In The Country

Drone photography in early spring is often a challenge. The snow has been replaced by mud, the trees are still naked, there’s only a hint of green. Finding good subjects is not so easy.

Jean Renoir directed A Day In The Country, a lyrical film about the French countryside, that appeared in 1946. Here and now, springtime photography is not always so idyllic.

Still, on a day in the country, a determined artist can discover images that please – or shock.

Every time I examine this study in Christian Orthodox architecture, I must admit I think first about Duracell’s copper top batteries.

But that’s unfair to the symmetrical beauty of the church’s architecture. I discovered it on the way home from a modestly successful foray in the country, and it’s by far my favorite from that excursion.

Another time, I launched the drone near a farm pond at the magic moment when two ducks were landing, leaving behind them elliptical wakes that sparkle in the sun and echo the shape of the pond.

Perhaps it was fortunate that the bare trees hadn’t yet regained their leaves because their pink blossoms didn’t obstruct the view of the pond.

Near the end of a day when some snow persisted, I set out to photograph a barn, but then discovered a shot I found more pleasing, two fence lines dividing the land from the sunset sky.

While the drone was hovering not much higher than my head, it was positioned ideally above a snowy ditch that I was happy not to have to wade through.

I think the salmon sky contrasts pleasingly with the dark hills and shadowed fences, and with the snow, tinted by the pink-yellow of the dominating sky.

As the fences converge toward the left, the literal depiction of a farm takes second place to a sense of shapes artfully arranged. Two lower triangles support a rectangular, painterly canvas above.

Yet not every springtime image is as beautiful.

Here, in a sea of mud, the devastation of agriculture for the sake of a housing subdivision, two island farm houses are left standing.

All the trees – generators of oxygen, captors of carbon dioxide, home for insects and birds, bearers of life – have, with one stark exception, been destroyed.

And why do these two houses stand? As witnesses to us about what was once there?

Certainly not as a future habitation. For look, the roof has succumbed to attack and weather is devastating the furniture. It’s an upsetting view that only a drone can impose on us.

Of course, we understand that people need places to live, and not everyone wants to inhabit a downtown condo.

Still, it’s painful to witness how wantonly we sometimes denude the environment, to provide our children with grass to play on, and perhaps one day, a tree to climb. Jean, are you listening?