Deserving of an Explanation

I have to admit: on Tuesday night, I was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news, when I had to remind myself that I hadn't yet put a blog post together for Wordless Wednesday. I still have hundreds of photos that I've shot but haven't looked at, from Costa Rica, but I wasn't in the mood to go through them.

After several weeks of posts about my latest vacation, I was getting bored. Were you? You didn't want to see more pictures of Costa Rica, do you?

I went from watching the news to streaming another episode of For All Mankind, an Apple TV+ series that I've wanted to watch for a long time but only started watching upon my return from my recent vacation. I'm hooked.

But after watching the episode, I started thinking that I needed something for the next post.

I needed it.

Feeling the need to post something is exactly why I stopped blogging for several months, in 2019. If, at any time, I felt that The Brown Knowser was more of a job than of something that simply brought me joy, I told myself that I would stop, and so I hung up writing on my blog for more than four months.

It seemed like much longer, for me.

So on Tuesday, I did what I often do when I need ideas or inspiration for blogging: I turned to old photos. I have literally thousands of photos that I've shot and done nothing with. I also have old slide photos that I digitized years ago, also just sitting in folders, untouched since I scanned them.

I went to that unorganized folder of scanned images and my eyes fell on a bunch of photos that I had shot shortly after I got my first SLR, my Minolta X-700, and I saw a bunch of experimental images that I had basically rejected after the slides came back from the lab. They were mostly photos that I had taken at night, practicing with a tripod and guesstimating how much exposure I needed to make the photo worthwhile.

The shutter speeds of this camera ranged from 1/1000 of a second to 4 seconds. If you wanted to take a longer exposure, you had to set the camera to Bulb mode and then either count or use an independent timer. Even today, my preferred method of timing in Bulb mode—even with my D-SLRs—is to count (although, my D-SLRs can expose for as long as 30 seconds on their own).

Using Bulb mode with film photography can be a bit of a crap shoot. Because you can't see your results right away, you had to make a note of each shot and the corresponding settings. I kept a notebook every time I took experimental photos.

One evening, I visited my sister Jen and her boyfriend at their apartment, not far from the Baseline and Merivale intersection. Their building was surrounded by townhouses and single family units on quiet residential streets.

I decided to set up my camera on a tripod and take some long exposures from high up. Focused on one of the quiet streets, I waited for a car to come along. I took a couple of shots at different exposure times.

Most of the shots didn't turn out and I ended up throwing out either black slides, with nothing exposed, or washed-out slides, with little to no definition. Even the one slide that I kept wasn't very good and sat in my collection of slides, never looked at again until I bought a slide scanner and digitized all of my photos, regardless of the subject or condition of the image.

You never know what future technologies can do to a poor shot.

On Tuesday, looking through old photos, hoping to find something to inspire me, my eyes fell on a shot from that night, in 1986, on my sister's balcony. And at first, I told myself, "You're never going to use that image. Why not just delete it?"

But I rarely delete photos. The subject has to either be so out of focus as to not be discernable, a head has to be cut off, or be an absolute duplicate for me to throw it away. I'll shove it into an obscure folder, rather than permanently discard it.

The photo was pretty awful: a residential intersection with a street lamp, the yellow, illuminated street signs glowing. An overall green hue fills the frame. You can see the painted stop lines on one of the roads, and curved streaks of headlights as an invisible car moves on the other street.

Something about the photo made me want to keep it just as much as part of my brain was telling me to delete it. But I decided that I'd ultimately try to do something with it before taking any drastic action.

Using my smartphone, I imported the image into Snapseed and immediately cropped out most of the photo, keeping the light trails. I then used the Healing tool to brush out any lights or spots in the shot, so that only the light trails appeared in the frame.

I then brought the contrast all the way up and took the saturation all the way down. I sharpened the lines of the light trails, and that was it. Here's the resulting image, which I shared for Wordless Wednesday.

What do you think? Should this image still go in the waste basket? Should I have skipped posting anything on Wednesday and just gone back to watching For All Mankind?

Spoiler, I made these edits and prepared the blog post, from my phone, while I listened to an episode of Professor of Rock, on YouTube. And then I went back to watching my space show.

Happy Friday!