“By the light of the moon”

Often when I take photos at night, I have a few songs running through my head.  This past winter, I often reverted back to my childhood for my sound track.  For some odd reason “It’s a Wonderful Life” crept into my subconscious and provided me with “Buffalo Gals”.  This American classic song somehow brings out certain emotions. It must be the darkness that harkens me back to old black and white films (although I grew up with color, but my first personal TV was black and white"). 

At night there really is only one real option for photography,  the use of long exposures with a tripod.  I find myself near rivers and ponds at night to try and capture the reflection of light . I also enjoy using long exposures due to the transitions of objects through both time and space within the frame of the camera.  Objects transitioning from one space-time position to another while displacing the space before and after them.  Objects floating and displacing space like the logs and boulders in a river. 

Space-time is such a transitional playing field it behaves in accord to the objects around them.  A single long exposure is a unique capture of not only objects, but objects in transition.  They exist and don’t exist in certain positions.  

Looking back at my childhood, I am the moving light along the track, the flowing river of thoughts, the transitioning from one time frame to the next.  The boy that watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” all those years ago no longer exists, only his light continues on.  The boy’s interaction with a black and white film that featured an old song brought about emotions in a man 25 years later.  And that man took a photo while having “Buffalo Gals” running through his head along a river bank half a world away from his birth place.  That light continues and is captured not by the photos themselves, but by his act of taking them. 

(© Robert J. Hartung III, 2010 All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)