Racing against the sun

Steve Schwartzman

Jan 27

Two months ago today we drove from Lost Maples to Kerrville. The route eventually follows the Guadalupe River, and by the time we reached the town of Ingram the sun didn't have much longer to stay above the trees. I hurried to take a few pictures by that last and very warm light. One was the abstraction above, showing the upper parts of sunlit sycamore trees (Platanus occidentalis) reflected in the river. The camera sensor's weakness—its limited dynamic range compared to the human retina—worked in my favor by rendering details on the river bank very dark in comparison to the water and the reflections; processing pushed the dark to black. The more conventional scene below, no longer lit by direct light, features a bald cypress tree (Taxodium distichum) that had turned russet.

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"Have you heard? The world's about to end." Well, of course it isn't. In a seven-minute video John Stossel highlights a bunch of cataclysmic predictions that failed to come true. And no, the predictions of doom didn't come from leaders of religious cults—unless, of course, you recognize climate catastrophism for the secular religious cult that it is.