Saving Daylight Time

I try to get up at six in the morning most days.

That’s not a brag. My track record is mixed at best. It’s easier in the summer months when my old friend (the sun) shows up before I do. Being visited regularly by an inconceivably powerful engine of fire and light does wonders for some of us.

For others, or rather, other species, the sunrise is their indicator that it’s time to wrap up whatever they’re up to. The idea that a bat or a cougar or a raccoon does its thing without the sun to explain their surroundings is baffling. Where we see uncertainty, they evolved to see opportunity.

Humans might not be nocturnal, but we have managed to perpetuate the sun’s power long after it drops below the horizon. Fire, candles, flashlights, night-vision goggles, forward looking infrared sensors, they all offer a salvo in what appears to be a battle against the dark.

Nighttime photography is just another front in that war. You’re still trying to find light after the sun sets, but your technique evolves (or devolves) when you can’t just look up and find your light source.

To shoot at night, most people choose one of two options. The first necessitates the use of a tripod; set a trap with a longer exposure and wait for light to come to you. The second, my new personal favorite, is to bring “portable daytime” in the form of a flash. It’s brazen, artificial, and completely disingenuous to nearly any scene, which is why I’ve grown to love it.

Photographic technologies long ego evolved to a point in which proficiency of use became synonymous with reality. As long as settings were calibrated correctly, a photographer could create a two-dimensional replica of something and, generally speaking, viewers of that photograph accepted it as an accurate representation. You may not have noticed that a tree branch looked like an outstretched hand, but the photographer who took the picture did, and you maintain an assumption that somewhere out there was that same branch. You could go out and find it if you wanted to.

Of course, there’s plenty of ways to augment (or just obstruct) that realism, but that’s nothing new - especially in art. Even before the outbreak of the artificial intelligentsia, there were plenty of methods that allowed visual artists to dement their subjects into non-reality. As soon as photography became “pixel management”, there was nowhere for reality to hide.

The flash is probably the oldest culprit in the long line of tools that allow photographers to change how the world looks. They remove natural darknesses, but they also pluck out context. Naturally lit moments with a “before” and “after” become staged fossils in a terrarium of incandescence.

It’s no astute observation to say the world at night looks different than the world during the day. X does not equal Y. However, my explorations at night with a flash on my camera have shown me that the nighttime darkness really is another opportunity for creation. That isn’t an astute observation either, but I used to hear that and think “Yeah, sure. Should I ‘be the camera’ as well?”, so it’s refreshing to get humbled out of my pretensions every once in a while. The treacly blackness is both a void and a fuel source. Opportunity awaits in the darkness.

Thank you for your time.

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