I shot this on the day that Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President. The title is from Laurence Binyon’s poem, “The Fourth of August,” which conceived the First World War in the noblest of terms:

Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.

The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thought dilate,
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

Wilfred Owen had something to say about that enthusiasm, that “ardent” vision of the same war, of course:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Coincidentally, I’d been reading Dispatches, Michael Herr’s chronicle of his time in Vietnam during what the Vietnamese refer to as The American War. I’d also been recalling a 1996 essay by James M. Hopkins on the anniversary of both the start of the First World War and the Gulf of Tonkin “incident.” Hopkins drives from Binyon, through Owen, and straight to Kipling’s “Common Form,” from Epitaphs of the War:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied. 

Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun.

I bracketed several exposures with the goal of combining them into an HDR image. In Lightroom, I applied the LR/Enfuse plug-in to the RAW files of two of the bracketed exposures, importing the resultant TIFF back into Lightroom. I then applied an exposure increase, fill light and a graduated filter to further increase exposure in the bottom 2/3 of the image.

I haven’t been a fan of HDR because so many of the HDR images I’ve seen on Flickr look cartoonish or surreal. An image of the Los Angeles River by cinemafia, however, was so natural looking that I’m coming around.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”