Boxes and Frames and Time Travel

 I've been thinking about this idea for awhile and I'll try to express it now. In my world of photography I sometimes see the world in boxes or make frames out of a subset of my visual screen. My eyesight is what is giving me data from the visual spectrum, but in photography I can see images across time too. It is this time travel that I love so much about my photography. I think it is something I am pretty good at, but I know I continue to learn. Sometimes I review some of my older photos with less enthusiasm than when I took them, but enough with the self-deprecation... Still though, my photography continues to evolve and I am enjoying the ride.

"Museum of Astro Memories"

TIME TRAVEL: A quick shutter like 1/100 of a second will give a snapshot in time much like the result that my eyes give me in real time. If I blink I can sort of imagine that snapshot of what I just saw frozen as a memory. A photographic image is that same thing, but can never be seen in real-time so it becomes an actual memory almost exactly like what my brain stores of that frozen-in-time photo. (That was a weird sentence - I don't know if I made any sense there). 

When I take a long time-exposure like 8-seconds long or a set of 15 exposures for Starry Landscape Stacker  or take a series of photos for star trails I am going far beyond that real-time memory of what my brain stores as a "snapshot in time". This stretching of time beyond the present is what I mean by time travel. My astro-photos show a blurring of time (out of necessity with low light) or a refined crystallization of a moment in time in the case of SLS with noise reduction. It's all about time!

Another amazing thing about a timed exposure of say the Milky Way or Aurora or even a photograph of waves in a pond is all the additional color and data that appears, but that our present-state eyesight doesn't give us. For a Milky Way photograph you see purples and blue and red stars. The eye sees nearly all the stars in the night sky as bright white dots, but a timed exposure gives us more data - stars in many colors and luminosity. With the aurora borealis curtains of color appear for longer exposures, shorter exposures show other colors beyond the faint green that my eyesight gives. 

BOXES and FRAMES: Beyond the time-travel concept (bringing out new colors or blurring time) I am sometimes beginning to imagine my photography to be small boxes containing portions carved from the world. When I look through a lens something happens and I discover how the frame refines my view to a specific area. Deciding how big that area is can be hard for me to reduce in to that box. Sometimes I have to change lenses to get what I am trying for. Other times, as I mentioned in my last post, one camera works better than another. By using a timed exposure I can move outside of my box and into a new reality of sorts. Isn't that a fun way of looking at it? 

I think I want to write more about these concepts, but for now this will do. I'll have to read this over and see if it makes sense and where I can go with it.

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