Dean Family Cemetery Photos



View of the Entire Cemetery

Linen Flower  

 These photographs are of Dean Cemetery, which is within the Shenandoah National Park. It’s completely surrounded by the Park property. An arrangement between the Park and family members allows them to keep the cemetery there as long as they agree to maintain it.
It’s at mile marker 63.2 in the Central District of the park. The earliest birth date belongs to James Dean (born 1797 and died 1862). The range of time of the cemetery is remarkable. There are a few new stones, one with a photograph of a couple embedded into the stone. It’s not a small graveyard, and it’s very open, with trees cleared around the perimeter.

The process which was used to “relocate” the people living within the park boundaries has become a discussion in recent years. The National Park Service web site has an article by Audrey J. Horning, of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and The Queen's University of Belfast. It really shows that the way the “people from the hollows” were described at the time was far from the truth. http://www.nps.gov/shen/historyculture/displaced.htm There is also an article by The Hook (a Charlottesville weekly) that adds much more detail about the deals made around the creation of the park. http://www.readthehook.com/98743/mountain-folk-maligned-pork-propaganda-and-creation-cool-national-park . Creation and Dispossession: Shenandoah National Park and its Residents

Camellia Lit by Flashlight

The Camellia in the front yard once again bloomed with a snowfall following the next day.  I had wondered what would explain the early arrival of the blooms, which would probably doom it in more northern areas.  Wikipedia to the rescue: the source of the plant is the Himalayas.
 
The photo was taken at night by leaving the camera shutter open and selectively adding light (often called painting with light) with flashlight.

Ed Deasy

Tiny Flower

I was nosing around with the macro lens in the feral ivy patch below the shed (which was an outbuilding of a garage, located there many years ago), when I came across this little flower.  If you had the perspective of the flower it would have been an eerie experience.  A huge spherical glass would have broken through the clouds and leaves, and you would have seen the tiniest reflection of yourself.  Then there would have been the massive clunk noise of the shutter, like a door being slammed in heaven.

Lately I’ve been lurking around in the shadows, looking for night photographs. This one is beyond the exit ramp from the parking lot of Whole Foods. It’s the rear of the store’s parking lot, just off the ramp to the exit. The two walls of the building are a public face on the left, with an “alley” on the right. A car came through and left a track of lights. The radical difference between the two walls of the one building comes from the lighting. The right side is sodium vapor (warm), the left side is mercury (a small, bluish, swatch of the spectrum). Light comes from poisonous metals.  Not all light, mind ye.

I’m really trying to process these so that they look close to what it looks like to my eye.  I’m a night walker; I use the exercise and the difference sense of space as a “place” to think (wonder).

I tried to find an overview in Google Maps. I did, but the buildings roofs looked new and freshly painted. It turned out the copyright statement at the bottom had the image copyright date as 1994. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and there hasn’t been any money floating in it. So maybe a new-style WPA project will be painting the roofs white in all the big boxes that stretch from coast to coast.

Goodbye Vivian

Goodbye Vivian was taken on the long way to anywhere, Route 301, as it snakes through the infinite tidal flat lands. When this sign worked its way over the horizon, I was a bit struck by the personal tone. Surely it was for a goodbye party, or a retirement. Maybe they didn’t have enough letters to make a longer message.  There’s a song called "Goodbye Vivian" but the sign predates it by many years. It made me sad to know that Vivian had already left. I pulled in the empty parking lot, got out, took the picture, sat in the car for a while. 


The color in the photo: courtesy of Kodak and Kodachrome. Its was always a bit too vivid.

Photograph of a Water Skimmer on White Rock Falls Trail

I took this photo of a “skimmer” (water strider is the proper name) in a small stream on the White Rock Falls trail in Virginia. The stream  through a hilly section divided into small pools.
    The skimmers tended to shy away into a corner of the pool as they saw me lean in to take photos. Then, if I was fairly motionless, they would repopulate the surface slowly. The fact that they can float on surface tension, with thin “feet” is hard to really imagine. They should need tiny pontoons. The shadows of the skimmers on the stream bottom were interesting too. There were shadow circles where their feet were. The curvature of the water must have diverted the sunlight enough to cause a shadow.

"Jumping Spider" on a Butterfly

I had gone for a hike in the Skyline Drive part of the National Park, and noticed a butterfly on the trail ahead of me. It was flying low along the trail, and it landed just ten feet from where I was hiking. I had a camera with a macro lens in place, so I tried to get a shot of it as it stopped on a piece of grass. I noticed that it had something on its back near the “hinge” point of its wings. Through the macro lens I could see that it was a small spider. I took a few pictures, and then tried to brush the spider off with a twig. This wasn’t successful, as the spider evidently had a firm grip on the hinge of the wings.  Took a very close shot of the spider, and then left the two of them alone to play out the scenario. The spider in the picture almost looks like a piece of construction equipment.
 It’s possibly this type of spider: http://www.cirrusimage.com/spiders_jumping.htm