Morning Walk
The weather in the Netherlands the past several weeks has been, in a word, gray. I don’t recall last year having been as bad as this year, but it’s been pretty gloomy. Most of the time we’ve been socked in with very low clouds (seemingly at tree top or lower) and often fog of various densities. But since the cloud cover is so heavy, it’s not a light, mysterious fog, it’s a heavy, foreboding fog even when it’s not very dense. I think I now know how the ground troops felt during the Battle of the Bulge, shrouded in cloud cover day-in day-out hoping for the skies to clear. Somehow, the cold bites harder in these conditions. Let’s just say the conditions have not been calling me out to photograph.
Still, the desire to get a camera out never leaves entirely, and recently I’ve started seeing images on our morning walks. Which has led to one of my favorite questions, “I wonder what that would look like in a photograph?”
Well, there is a way to answer that - bring along a camera. Given most of our “walks” are in darkness (it doesn’t seem to lighten up until 8am or so), that meant the Q2MR would have to do given its amazing high ISO abilities. A quick check of my EXIF data reveals that all of the images were made at the maximum limit I’ve set for the autoISO - 12,500, with hand-held shutter speeds up to 1/2 second. Yup - photographing in the dark.
Because it’s been quite awhile since I’ve done something like this, I really had to learn things all over again. What might it look like? What will show and what won’t? All you can really do is, when you think you might be seeing something interesting, pick up the camera, frame as carefully as you can (remember to focus dammit!), and hold yourself as still as possible while you depress the shutter button.
And yes, once you make that first image, the mind starts asking photographic/composition questions, like will those trees off to the right reflect that light?
And then you start wondering whether you’ll be able to get a sense of spatial depth to the photograph and how might you do that.
You start to see interesting light effects that you don’t normally see during the daylight, and you try to take advantage of them, not knowing whether or not it will show in a photograph.
You then come across opportunities with moving objects (cars and trucks) and you take a range of images as they pass by, because you really do not know how they’ll turn out. (In this case, failures for the most part.)
And every once in a while you’ll see something that is so graphically striking, even in the darkness, that you’re pretty sure it will make for an interesting image.
Then you take it all back home to check it out on the computer. Because in the darkness, you really can’t see the images very well on the rear LCD and besides, it’s cold as hell out there.
It was a good effort. A first effort. I can’t say the images are particularly rewarding (you should have seen the rejects!), but it was good to be out with a camera and thinking about image-making (while talking about other photography-related topics with Ann in-between photographs). Naturally, it was a good walk. It almost always is good to be out.
Will I keep it up? I’m not sure, but I’m not ruling it out.