Encroaching

I had fun in the morning pulling together some ideas for a packaging project for a real actual thing. It has been a while since I've thought in three dimensions. The last time it was to design and build a bed with storage inside, more than six years ago now I believe.

Megan brought me some flowers home from the cheap food store. It saves us a lot of money buying from there, however it does make us worry about the risky-borderline-dangerous genetically modified sources for some of the items. Wheat and corn are just two of the ones we know are probably f****d. Thanks Monsanto.

After a bit, we painted. Good things are starting to happen in the studio now, which is a relief. It seems wine and chocolate help. I'll leave you to figure out who has which.

Tonight's exposure was twenty-five minutes long, over fifteen shots. I've discovered, from this, the second lesson in star trail photography: you're always going to want to shoot for longer! (Lesson one was, of course, fully charged and in my pocket.) I expect the more I do this, the more comfortable I will become being out there longer.

Fayetteville is dark at night, more dark than I ever expected and more dark than you would probably believe. Street lights seem in many cases an afterthought, put up randomly at the intersections of pole-borne power lines. For all that humanity is quite still in this small, Bible Belt town at night, it is nonetheless busy out there. The warm night air is slow and thick, although occasional breezes stir it and whisper in the omnipresent trees. All around are the sounds of insects, the susurrus of chirrup, yac-yac-yac-yac-yac-yac-yac-yac-yac, the wind-up bug and others less common. Fireflies blink on the edge of the field of vision, while there is the occasional flash of headlights from traffic on bigger roads at the end of a block. A large, wall-mounted television flickers behind a curtain. Somewhere a dog is barking. Bushes hold furtive rustles. Standing in the middle of it, covered in eighties-car-scented, bug-repelling sun block, in one spot for half an hour, taking a photo of a private residence, is an at times challenging experience. It is entirely different from spending the equivalent amount of time taking photos in the streets of Edinburgh at night; a different kind of edginess creeps into the mind. An edginess not to do with drunks and the possibility of being mugged, but somewhere between the knowledge of the variety and not-always friendly, sporadically deadly, nature of the night time wildlife and the thought of the legality of deadly force and the likelihood of guns. All of this is because I'm new here and standing out there, in someone else's street, in the dark, dark night, taking photos of someone else's home is a challenge. I'm enjoying it, I'm pretty sure, yet it is a challenge. And it is just too damned warm out there to run!

Star trails were not meant to be the point of these photos. When I began to take them, I had something else entirely in mind. However the idea was half-formed and the star trails have nudged their way into the frame.

So what, you may ask, am I doing out there? That is a good question, although not one I intend to spend any time at this late hour contemplating. Tomorrow is another day. I might do this again then. I might not. I'll just keep on deciding one day at a time.

(10-9187-9201/1477)

Today's soundtrack:
Groove On August 2007 (v/a)
Voigt Kampf - Used

• 6 comments :
• show tags

• about stewartbremner :
• view blipfolio