3 am violets

 

limeandsalt, originally uploaded by nezua.

i could probably go round and round with the idea of ‘what does it mean to be a photographer now’ and in many ways and its even possible that i might never answer it and even tho it might sound like psychosocial diddling it’s not a trivial question because it makes sense to think about what you do every once in a while. i’m still thinking on all of it. it’s good thinking. and i do know one thing…if you are awake and walking around in a dark 3 am parking lot taking ten second bulb exposures because without your doing so there would be an invisible shade of orange left hidden behind the curtain of time you definitely are deranged in a very specific way…a way that i can relate to!

the diptych above was taken with a point n shoot camera and i think it’s rather delish. its still a canon, the SD1000, i think. lens the size of a pea. slightly bigger maybe. can catch a nice focus if you are careful, but don’t try to blow it up too big or the “grain” comes apart. and not in a pleasing silver halide sort of way.

right now, the sky is amazing, again. i really would love to try and capture it, and not just in my usual “point the wafer camera at the sky between sips of coffee” way, where i telefoto past the screen. i wonder if i could somehow get on the roof of the building one morning with my telefoto. do some dawn shots with the real camera and no telephone wires in the way. i should talk to mike, i wonder if he’d go for it.

i also did some 15 second exposures of these thistle flowers on the table. very dark house, only a streetlight coming through the big plate glass window in the living room. i held my phone up directly overhead for a secondary light washing down from above, a cooler one, a sort of hand-held 5200ºK softbox by Apple.

it’s the kind of thing i used to do when i first found out about bulb exposures, like drawing in the air with incense coals, but that was in the days i had to wait almost a week to get the film back and see how my experiments turned out. that’s the one great thing about digital for sure.

that’s funny. i have to dig up those old pics sometime. me with the pre-grunge flannel and the bad (long) haircut waving around incense in the dark. didn’t realize you’d also capture whatever goofy expression you had on your face, thinking you were invisible in this unlit room. ah, the magic of the bulb exposure! and how cool that we still call it a “bulb” exposure even in the digital era. we’re pretty removed, at this point, from actual bulb-lit exposures. there is something to be said for the exquisite and sometimes odd detail and color that emerge from long exposures. then, and now, too. film and sensor chip.

DSLRs seem to have a lot of limitations when it comes to ultra long exposure times, like shooting star trails and such. noise, processing time, battery life. with film you just pop that shutter release cable button, screw the pin to hold it shut and walk away until you are done.

anyway. dawn is really burning up the sky. time to switch from leisure to work mode. not that there is a huge amount of difference. but instead of tiptoeing around with a few lenses (between the last couple paragraphs i was away from you and alone on main street in my bare feet as the rain lightly tapered off so i could lean against the piano store corner to grab a tele shot of the sunlit clouds) i’ll be sketching the doors to mexican temples and faces of quetzalcoatl associates.