Rangefinder Magazine
February 2006

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The Last Word Larry Singer
The Perfect Storm

"The Perfect Storm"

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2005, was a day the residents of northern South Carolina will not soon forget. On that day, a rain storm and a blast of arctic cold air combined to leave trees, overhead electric lines and 350,000 darkened homes coated in ice. When I awoke at 5 a.m. to begin my day as a photographer and writer for the Daily Journal and Daily Messenger newspapers in Seneca, South Carolina, I could tell by my blinking digital clock that I had lost power sometime during the night. Shortly after brewing a pot of coffee, I lost power again, as did my newspaper’s building, and everyone else between Seneca and Spartanburg. Because I cover Seneca, I had a pretty good idea what my lead story would be.

The sun came up two hours later; what I saw when I looked outside was absolutely astounding: icicles—thousands of them glowing in the muted morning light, dangling from nearly every ice-coated branch of every tree. Icicles also hung, perfectly spaced, from every glistening and over-weighted power line. Thinking this spectacle would make a nice piece of pictorial art for my paper, I snapped about 50 frames with my Canon 20D. Shooting in dim light, with a very slow 50–500mm lens—from under a covered front porch to avoid getting my camera soaked from the still-falling rain—I only nailed a few good shots.

While shooting and shivering, I heard what sounded like the crack of a rifle as a huge branch of a nearby tree succumbed to the ice and crashed to the ground. Before the day was over, a hundred tree limbs in Seneca would topple onto overhead wires. When power was restored around noon to half the city, including my home and newspaper, I bundled up and drove to work. The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle by the time I arrived. As I opened my car door and looked around the parking lot, I saw that one barren, ice-coated bush overhead, backlit against the gray sky, had become a startling work of art. With a Sigma 18–125mm lens, and my Canon 20D set on Program, I took just one shot, after trying, and failing, to frame the branch against a darker contrasting background.

When I first downloaded the images, I ignored the backlit branch. I concentrated instead on the ice-coated berries, which wound up on the front page. It wasn’t until I downloaded the ice shots again at home that I took a good look at the backlit skeletal bush and converted it to black and white. Using the Zoom Tool in Photoshop to critically examine the image, I happily discovered it looked eerily similar to the striking X-ray photographs created by Albert Koetsier, whose work appeared on the June 2004 cover of Rangefinder.

By the end of the day the temperature rose, the ice melted, and the magic disappeared.