From a technical point of view, this image suffers from some significant shortcomings.  I was much less experienced as a photographer back then.  The dynamic range in the scene was far greater than could be captured with the slide film available at the time, leaving the cloudy sky featureless and windmill’s low-value details muddy.  Digital processing helped, but couldn’t completely compensate for the poor exposure.  And yet, this image captures a mood that resonates strongly with me.

 

All my life I’ve loved cloudy weather.  I’ve appreciated the cool and humid climate, and the lack of need for sunglasses (or a hat to cover a few square inches of scalp which, in more recent years, has become startlingly more exposed to the sun’s rays).  On this fairly typical spring day in Holland, it never actually rained discernible drops of water, yet it was moist throughout the day, and you could almost imagine gravity pulling the mist to the ground.  Everything was wet.  Everything was clean.  Delightfully absent was the layer of dust so typical of desert regions in the western United States.  On a sunny day (there were a few during that trip), the water coating on everything makes for richly saturated colors.  On this day, those colors were more pastel, more moody.  The humidity made my hair so frizzy that there was little evidence of having carefully brushed it in the morning; after a few hours of this, I stopped looking in the mirror.  There was a slight chill in the air.  Coupled with the humidity, you have a condition known (after translation) as “water cold”, which makes you feel colder for a given temperature than you would expect.  The whole effect — the flat landscape and lighting, the myriad shades of greenish grey, the cool and moist air, and the fresh smell in the air — seems strangely invigorating, comfortable, “normal”.  Since I was born and raised Southern California, and have lived most of my adult life in Utah — places with climates radically different from Holland — I can only attribute this feeling of “normal” to genetics.

 

Here’s the kicker: Some people who see this scene describe it as dreary.  Imagine that!