Katherine Wikoff

Saw these long shadows while walking to Starbucks for a refill after teaching my morning class today. I really liked the LONG diagonal lines and the bright white light lining the top of the utility pipes inside the cage, so I stopped and took a photo.

Here’s the bigger picture, for context.

If you follow my blog, you’ll probably recognize that we’ve been here before. I walk this way to Starbucks just about every weekday, so it’s only natural it would be a spot that takes up some space on my phone’s camera roll. And as you can see, this little corner of the world changes its looks pretty substantially depending on the time of day, whether or not it’s sunny, the seasonal angle of the sun, etc.

For example, here’s a picture I took last year with morning sunlight casting cool reflections down from the building’s windows.

And here’s a photo taken later in the morning, still early enough to have the window-pane patterns across the lawn but also late enough to see some diagonal shadows cast along the white walls of the building from those pipes jutting out. Plus there are some interesting additional shadows cast by the chain-link of the utility cage.

Below is shot of the area with afternoon sun, too late to cast diagonal shadows from the pipes (which are barely distinguishable from the rest of the wall here) but not too late to cut a bright swath of light across the lawn between the shadows of building and trees.

And finally, here’s a boring “as is” photo on an overcast day, with no light/shadow drama whatsoever. Except that, unlike in the photo above, where you could barely make out the four pipes, the cloud-dispersed “soft” light wraps the tiniest bit of shadowing around the base of each pipe to give it some shape.

So that’s today’s post. As one might say in a Facebook status, I’m “feeling grateful” for a beautiful Wisconsin summer day. Sunny and slightly breezy, with temperatures right around 70 dgrees. Perfect.