Welcome to our third edition of my behind the scenes of my 2022 wall calendar! This month marks the quarter pole of the no longer "new" year and hopefully you all are finding growth and having a little bit of fun on this crazy spinning ball we call home.
For those of you with my NSFW calendar, I am dead serious about calling your congressman about daylight savings. There are parents out here that would do things they aren't proud of for that lost hour of sleep, and it's me. I'm parents. And now without further ado:
It was a clear evening in Oklahoma City as the sun began to fade and I could see the moon starting to rise directly over the downtown skyline looking from West to East. That, I thought, would make a cool picture. So I run into the house and grab my camera and kiss the babies and the wife and run out the door. Now, this was no ordinary boring small white moon, but one of those big orangish/yellow ones. As I approached the area I wanted to set up, I looked up and much to my chagrin, clouds had started to move in and the moon snuggled perfectly behind them. I sat for a little while and by the time I saw the moon again, it was well above the skyline and had shrunk down to a much less intriguing size. Bummer.
Lamenting a lost opportunity, I headed home the same way I always do and as I passed this busy roundabout in Midtown, I thought "what the hell, let's have a little fun." I dig long exposure photography at night. During the daytime I feel like I try to maintain a level of crispiness to my photographs, that is, I try to completely freeze the image. No motion blur, no movement. (I've been breaking free of this habit lately and really appreciating a bit of motion in my work.) But at night I am much more likely to extend my shutter speed and capture light trails and such. I'd been set up here for about 10 minutes and had gotten a few frames but nothing really special. Just as I was about to pack it up, an ambulance came blaring down the road. I snapped one more frame as it passed by and without even reviewing it I shrugged and headed home. This is not my favorite picture ever. It's not technically difficult if you have even a rudimentary idea of how to manipulate a camera. But it is a part of town that I love, and as jaded as I am from living in Oklahoma my entire life, I thought I'd like to share it. I didn't get the picture I set out to get that night, but isn't that the lesson that life teaches us over and over and over again? Make the best of what you can and for god's sake SHARE it with anyone that will let you.
Have a kick ass month.