RustyBug 
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| p.1 #1 · A Moment In Time . . . Philosopy | |
Sorry guys ... no pic for this one.
So I'm driving along last night on a business trip without a camera (yeah I know). The rain has recently cleared the air, and the sun is setting on my right, raking across fields and illuminating farmhouses & grain bins on the left. The moon is in the sky shining brightly in the light blue as the sun is able to illuminate both it and the earth simultaneously. The colors of the sun and the skyline continue to change from a white center spot to a giant fireball with each passing mile as the it sinks ever lower toward the horizon until slipping below, yet still shining brightly on the waxing moon.
I couldn't help but think about one of Ben's pics
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1136381/0
and some of the dialogues we've had in times past. From that, here are some thoughts that rattled around in my mind while driving along.
Whenever we take a picture, it represents a segment of time. We typically consider it to be a "snapshot" of time, as though it were but a specific moment. But, whether it is a 3 second "long exposure' that shows us the motion of fast flowing water or blurs slow moving water into a calm ... or is a 1/3,000 second that "freezes" the motion ... or a 3 minute "star trail". they all still cover a spectrum of time from that allows us to show to our viewer. The one thing that these typically do have in common is that they are a "continuous" display of that segment of time.
So, as I'm driving along, I wanted to share with you the light raking across the fields, the grain bins illuminated, the bright moon, the purple haze, the giant fireball ... yet these did not all occur simultaneously. Rather they covered a segment of time that was around 20-30 minutes of elapsed time. So, it donned on me that while the vast majority of our captures represent "continuous" segments of time (large or small), the only way that I would be able to share with you the experience of my 20-30 minutes would be to assemble a composite ... which would still represent a "segment" of time ... just that it would be a "discontinuous" capture.
Going back to my "What's the point?" "What's the message that you want to convey to your viewer?" ... my message was that I wanted to emotively share each of those things with you. Such an image would not be an "accurate" recording of a single point in time ... but then, even a 1/3,000 sec image is not a "single" point in time ... just very short "range" of continuous time. The main difference would then be the aspect of "continuous" vs. "discontinuous" range of time ... as required to capture the larger range of time. But for the person watching a scene over an extended period of time ... they would have experienced the same elemental observations, whereas for a "passerby", they would have only experienced the "snapshot" of the shorter segment in time that they observed.
I mention this because, we often times struggle with the accuracy of the recorded image vs. the emotive and communicative ability of the final produced image. I know that I have wrangled with the two over the years ... with the height of it being when I espoused that AA "cheated". Yet, I am reminded of how much I enjoy the "watching & waiting" as much as "pressing the button". From that, I'm beginning to wonder how one can convey the pleasures of "watching & waiting" over such an extended "moment in time".
Suffice to say, I was not in a position to share photographically what I experienced last night. Rather, I am left only to words. Yet, even if I had my camera with me, it would have been a challenge to do so in a way that would have produced such an effect. Some would argue that such a composite would be a "fake" or that "I cheated" ... I know that I would've as well at some time or another. But, as I find myself "shifting" my photographic perspectives from accurate recording to message conveyance ... the concept of "discontinuous" vs. "continuous" segments of time seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift now as well.
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