The hot, dry summer in Svaneti is ending, in fits and starts, and we are now shutting our windows at night and wearing more clothes during the day. Hot is relative, though, compared to Georgia’s lowlands: what’s 30 degrees C in Tbilisi or Zugdidi, 25 at night, in midsummer? Nothing! But I do have to keep on removing a layer or two as things cool down, then warm up again. Definitely not just a smooth descent of temperature. A clear night might get us down to 5 degrees C; a cloudless day following might go up to past 20.
One tourist has already rebooked a September 9 stay for the 22nd, hoping for drier weather; my wife can stop watering the garden daily to keep it alive, as frequent rains remove the necessity of that task. Day by day, now, the all-green mountains are yellowing or reddening into their mix of fall colors. The dark evergreens will stay exactly that. A thin layer of snow on the mountaintops, as is likely to come before the overall whitening, will add more magic to the palette. A while of dark, leafless deadness is next, in the last two months of the year, before that big snow transforms everything into gray tones, virtually all color gone.
With such weather, of course, come more clouds. I often look out the south-facing windows of the house to see what is developing at the huge Mountain Wall there. I often go upstairs with both my iPhone and big Canon digital camera, for simultaneous timelapse videos and long-lens closeups.
A timelapse is always a gamble against the near future. You start a 1-frame-per-second shoot, never knowing what the cloudscape will look like an hour or so from now; even 5 minutes in the future, a big fog might have boiled up from the Enguri and obscured everything further than 50 meters away. The delightful thing that timelapses have shown me is that clouds can move across the sky in many different directions at the same time, almost unnoticed by our eyes but sped up gloriously by this video process.
Each layer of clouds might have its own wind pushing it in another vector. Put it all together, and you can have wonderful organized chaos. The rotating night sky’s stars would add still another motion; but I’ve not yet tried the transition from daylight to night, though it’s on my list.
I often prop up the phone on the windowsill for the timelapse and then shoot through the same window at the same time with the big camera, zooming in for details, which I’ll mostly process later in black and white. And here is a whole other kind of magic.
Pointy evergreens on gorge edges force their way through wisps of cloud like ship prows. White clouds isolate themselves against the dark green background. Sometimes a bank of cloud parts to reveal that darkness inside or underneath it. I’m always comparing positive and negative space, black on white or white on black. I might even reverse all the tones of a scene, making a monochrome negative of it, if that works better.
And, yes, sometimes the dragons do come out to play, they or other fantastic monsters. We have so many words for them in English, many borrowed from other languages. Basilisk, wyvern, gorgon, balrog, phoenix, Garuda, thunderbird, harpy, siren, griffin, chimera, manticore, sphinx, cockatrice, hydra… and hundreds more. I am attuned to them, expecting them, and not disappointed.
Over the course of a two-hour timelapse, I might also shoot 200 or 300 stills (if house chores permit), as the clouds swirl in and away. So I end up with both a video record of the whole event and many small closeups of its little individual dramas, at the same time. Different media and appearances from the same slice of time and space. I don’t need to go far, or even anywhere except upstairs. Another location would give me entirely different results. But I have spent 13 years in this house, including 10 winters, and know well what landscapes it has to offer from every direction. This, after a lifetime of moving house and moving from one country to another, is the lesson of gradual, patient discovery, of what a place has to show to the slow observer. Worth the years. Dragons, other denizens, I greet you!
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
