Tempest

Tempest is for the person who has learned that standing still doesn't mean waiting for the storm to pass.
 
I made this on a stretch of road I drive often, racing an incoming storm home rather than out chasing a photograph, the ominous front dark and heavy in the rear-view mirror. To the north and east a completely different sky was unfolding, warm, gold and calm, and passing a windmill and water tank I'd photographed before in gentler light, I realised the golden sky behind it was already a striking backdrop on its own. Then I recognised something more: if I pulled over and waited, the storm itself would eventually enter the frame, right at the boundary between the two skies. I let it build in just enough to read clearly as a storm, without losing the gold needed to hold the windmill and tank in silhouette.
 
What I felt, waiting there more exposed than I wanted to be, was nervousness and excitement tangled together in roughly equal measure, and a growing certainty that leaving now, before the storm arrived in the frame, would cost me something I might never experience again.
 
Tempest is for the decisions you make right at the edge of something you can't control, when leaving feels safer than staying. Let it hang somewhere you see when you're tempted to run, and it will keep insisting on the same thing it insisted to me: stillness isn't the absence of turbulence, it's what you choose to hold onto in the middle of it.