Blog Archives
sometimes starlight is insufficient
That cemetery light ruined the comet photograph I had in mind, as I mentioned yesterday and am not at all bitter about. So I decided to go all in, and photograph the damn light.
Pearce Cemetery
Hale County, Texas
photographed 7.18.2020
Night Cisterns
Remember the other day when I promised (or, maybe, threatened) that there’d be more photos of the cemetery cisterns? And, look – here they are again!
What happened is that on the first visit to this little cemetery, the Patient Spouse and I completely overlooked the fact that the cemetery had a giant “security light” right in the middle of the place. And because we’d overlooked the light, we thought that going to the cemetery to look at NEOWISE might afford me the opportunity to get some comet + grave images. So imagine our dismay on comet night when we were about a quarter of a mile away and felt like moths being drawn to the flame of the light. And just like that, the comet + grave concept was done.
And then later, the comet was shy, hiding behind clouds.
Not to be deterred, I decided to implement Part One of the cisterns project.
Pearce Cemetery
Hale County, Texas
photographed 7.18.2020
Cloud Swirl
My rule to look around back came in handy the other night. We’d gone out to try to see the comet NEOWISE but the clouds made that plan unworkable. I turned around to see what was behind us (photographically speaking), and that’s when I spotted this fantastic cloud.
Pearce Cemetery
Hale County, Texas
photographed 7.18.2020
Downtown’s Reflections
There’s something about shooting into very reflective windows that I find appealing. You may have already noticed that.
In this case, I feel like just about everything that was going on in downtown Pampa on the night of the 26th ended up in a single image.
Pampa, Texas
photographed 12.26.2019
Left like a shadow on the step
I had plans for shooting this place at night: there would be clouds moving past that I could capture with a long exposure, or maybe the sky would be clear and I could get stars, and the buildings would be dark, lit by only by light accumulating gradually on the camera’s sensor.
Of course – I’m sure you are way ahead of me here – none of those things came to pass. Although it was cloudy through the day, by late afternoon, the clouds had moved on. The building had not one but two giant floodlights on it, which derailed the accumulated-slowly-over-time light inside the camera and made the stars unseeable.
But I had come all this way and had committed to staying the night alone inside the walls of the old fort, so I set up the tripod and camera and set to work.
Presidio la Bahía
Goliad, Texas
photographed 5.6.2019
