Night Walks 1

November brings on short day length and so it’s a good time to see if we can make something interesting happen with darkness. With the set I posted in December ’22 in mind, I’m taking evening walks around town looking for photographs. Most current cell phones have a night mode feature which can, with a little practice, permit you to capture sharp, hand-held images. So, for this set, my camera stays home.

There’s an argument to shoot night photographs in monochrome, but I’m starting off in color to see what happens where nature meets artificial light. This first piece combines some of that light with the distortion of the phones ultra-wide angle.

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18 thoughts on “Night Walks 1”

    1. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but anxiety about our election is part of the fuel for the walks and the images. I found myself doing the same thing in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic. And in November 2016 after that gloomy election.

      I do like shifting gears. I always admired Pat Metheny (who really is famous) for releasing “Song X” back in the 80’s with Ornette Coleman. That record was about as far from the melodic lyricism he was known for as you could take it. And it was a good one.

      1. The word ‘Trump’ isn’t allowed in our house at the moment.. It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.. On Wednesday night we had a clash between Pro-Palestinian people and Israeli supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv, after the soccer game Ajax Amsterdam-Maccabi Tel Aviv. Almost war, in Amsterdam.. Terrible and sad. I’m listening to Song X at the moment.. I wouldn’t have guessed it was an Pat Metheny album. I used to listen a lot to bands like Soft Machine, Henry Cow, Return to Forever, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc. when I was around 20; So it’s not that strange to my ears. Shifting gears is a good thing for ‘Endangered species’.. Enjoy the weekend!

        1. We read about the clash in Amsterdam. The world seems to be slider closer to a dangerous edge with every passing day. Glad you took a listen to “Song X.” Corea, McLaughlin, Weather Report: hopefully all that great music will continue to raise us up.

    1. Thanks Ed. As I mentioned to Harrie, the creepy part is me processing the news, but I love light and seeing what optics can do and I hope that communicates as well. I’m guessing there’s artists who have begun working on their Guernicas in the last few days. More power to the creative spirit.

  4. Modern cell phones are capable of beautiful images. I’ve had great luck with my old Samsung and I’ve printed a 16×20 from a straight file and it looks beautiful. I think that a lot of pros may reluctantly admit this but few will deny it. I’m currently using the micro 4/3 system (instead of my trusty Nikon full frame) and it has brought back a joy in photography that had gone missing the past few years. Beautiful image, btw.

    1. I agree with your comments about modern cell phones. Who would’ve expected image quality like that twenty years ago? On the other hand, there’s still no realistically functional manual control or real lens options aside from the two or three they all come with. I find little that’s intuitive about using phones for photographs and the default HDR and color bias is frustrating. But that’s me.

      In spite of all that, some features including the night mode, seem to have been well-engineered with a strong leash on whatever HDR program it’s using. Thanks for commenting, Ken.

  5. There’s a lot of movement in this composition. Very dynamic. Looking forward to the rest of the series. Less important, but phone camera technology really is quite remarkable. It’s a shame that, despite the results, the process doesn’t really feel to me like I’m doing photography

    1. Thanks Matt. I think my response to Ken up above applies to your thoughts as well. The intuitive sense of using a well-designed camera is absent with phones and so it’s something like trying to play music on a clarinet that wasn’t really designed with music as its primary function. That being said, they do handle some tasks surprisingly well, perhaps the night mode being at the top of that list. One of my many frustrations with phones is the inability to compose well in daylight, and the lack of a real sense of stability that comes at the moment of capture. Using a phone to photograph after dark eliminates the first problem and I’ve found myself getting more confident in the phone’s ability to get rid of shake within this mode.

  6. That first sentence – I’ve been thinking about the same thing, except that I ask myself what I can do with the daytime darkness in or around the forest and I haven’t thought about using my phone. In any case, it’s a pleasure to be sensitive to seasonal changes and to think about what you can do differently with/because of the changes.

    I do remember your previous nightime photos – not in particular, but a general memory of them. This one has a funhouse feeling.

    1. It is a pleasure to bring our photography to seasonal cycles. As I mentioned to Harrie, this project may have had some therapeutic aspects as well.

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