Twilight along the Loing river

The story behind the photo

Moret-sur-Loing at twilight, wider and earlier than the night frame from the same bank. The sky still has structure, great slow banks of blue-grey cloud that take up the upper half of the picture, and the town sits below them as a low line of stone with the river underneath.

The composition gives the sky the weight on purpose. In the night version the town is the brightest thing in the frame; here it is the smallest, pressed between two large moving surfaces. The same subject, photographed from almost the same place, becomes a different photograph depending on which third you decide to give away.

A long exposure smooths the Loing into a single plane and, more importantly, drags the clouds into streaks that all point the same way. That is the real reason to use minutes rather than seconds at this hour: not the water, but the wind.

The town has kept its two medieval gates and its mill, and its church, which dates back to the twelfth century, still rises above the roofs. At this hour, before the lights take over, it looks almost exactly as it must have looked to anyone standing on this bank three hundred years ago.

I wanted the same place to yield two different pictures, and this is the one in which the weather, not the town, is the subject.