Twilight occurs every day – twice. By definition it’s the time between daylight and nighttime or nighttime and daylight – the time when the sun is not visible but its light is refracting off particles in the air. In my life, “twilight,” in common usage, applied only to the evening. To my eyes and other sensibilities, twilight lasts about ten to fifteen minutes. Most often it goes unnoticed. But there are twilight times when I feel suspended in a magical realm, where all is familiar but nothing is as it is during the other times of the day.
Twilight stopped me in my tracks one day this week. The sky (above) offered a dramatic and pleasant show of colored striations. Milky pinks and blues filled the sky.
The pond’s surface (above), a combination of smooth ice and crusted snow received the light and presented it back in a black and pink metallic flowing through blue and white. 
I am most struck by twilight when the air itself turns blue or pink or orange. In the photos I took this past week – all was blue. It was quickly too dark for the camera to work on its own. So, for the picture above, I used the auto exposure lock – focusing first on the treeline, then having the camera register the brightest lighting on the snow – the mound of white snow left of center near the bottom of the photo. Giving the camera that light setting, I was able to capture what I was actually seeing.
By the time I took the photo below, it was so dark the camera did its own reading and gave me this shot which was not far off the blacker blue I was seeing.
As for the moon high above at the top of this post as it sat low on the horizon – well, I had about two minutes of that lighting to work with. I made some adjustments (of both the aperture and shutter speed) while taking about twenty shots to get the camera to read the true color I was seeing – a gorgeous orange moon, with its surface markings astoundingly clear, suspended in a pool of blue just over a ridge of black treetops.
I can’t really describe in words or photographs what happens to me when I am within twilight. Certainly, I know it’s a treat. And I appreciate it, in fact I am thrilled by it and I feel fully alive, keenly alive. But there’s something else in it too – I am a tiny bit unnerved, as if something has changed in my environment and I wonder if it will return to what is fully familiar. Am I where I think I am, or have I passed through to another world?
SilverLining 