Fall Clock -1

Every good golf club has a clock somewhere on the property, and the one at Four Bridges has become one of my favorite subjects. It's an old-style post clock, four-sided, with black iron scrollwork and white faces that catch whatever light is available. Drop it in front of a Midwest hardwood in mid-October, and you've got a composition that writes itself.

The morning I made this image, the fall color was at its most aggressive — a maple on the left had gone full scarlet, the trees behind it were holding yellow and gold, and the sky above was one of those cirrus-brushed autumn skies that make every photographer reach for their camera. The two green Adirondack chairs tucked in on the left added a human note to the scene, and the timber-edged planter bed along the bottom gave the foreground a graphic structure that kept the eye in the frame.

I like photographs that hold multiple ideas at once. This one is partly about the clock — a small monument to time and tradition at a club that values both — and partly about the season itself, which is nothing if not a lesson in time passing. The clock keeps going; the leaves don't. The contrast is quiet, but it's the whole point.

Fall Clock honors the small, steady monuments that anchor a club's character — marking the hours through a season that itself refuses to slow down.