If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss
I sit, a time-traveler sorting through his souvenirs. I look at the numbers, the cold arithmetic, the rattling digital bones of last Friday’s harvest. An excursion, they call it. No, it was a pilgrimage to the sun, a visit to Canyonlands National Park, and I have returned with ghosts trapped in a silver box.
Now, the real work. The séance. This is post-production, you see. I am assembling the data, tapping on the walls of the code, coaxing the silent stories to speak, to tell me of the moments.
The raw numbers glitter, but they are sterile. A universe of 42.3 gigabytes, cold as interstellar space. The truth is not in the numbers; it’s between them. You must wade in, dive deep into that electric ocean, and remember. Remember the decisions, the chill on the skin, the click of the dial when your eye was pressed to the glass. What story did I really bring home from that dawn? It’s a mountain of data, a celestial avalanche. And like all good rock miners facing an ore wall, you pick away–divide and conquer.
One decision, one magic spell I cast, was to shoot 5-level exposure brackets as the sun rose.
Be patient with me here, we’re wading into the deep, humming water now.
For every instant the sun boiled over the horizon, each release of the shutter was not one picture, but five. Five different versions of the same heartbeat of light.
One of the five is the "average" shot, the polite, simple thing your cell phone might capture. But then—oh, then!—two shots are blasted with light, burning the sky to white-hot magnesium, digging out the secrets that were lost in the deepest, blackest shadows. And two more, plunged into a sudden twilight, to capture the very soul and furnace-heart of the sun itself and the deep hidden shadowy mysteries of the canyons.
Five shots. Five layers of information. Consider the sensor: rows and columns of microscopic eyes, each holding 12 bits of light, 12 whispers of color. I won't go deeper. The message is this: bracketing gives you five times the universe to play with. You find the essence. You find the dynamic range. You smash the limits of the simple, unfeeling sensor and see beyond what one eye, in one instant, can ever see.
This electric witchcraft, this stacking of five realities, allows you to find the gift. The gift the Muse gives you. She only comes when you're there, you see, standing on the cold rock, shivering in the dark. She breathes the light onto the world, and the good god of war—my camera, my faithful clockwork soldier—helps me capture her offerings.
This is how I see it. It gives you more to find what you, the fragile, feeling human, were truly seeing. The trick, the whole magic act, is to stay aware of the thunder in your chest, the emotion of the story unfolding, even as your fingers execute the cold mechanics of the machine.
My goal, my quest, is to plunge my hands into that mass of digital information and pull out the feeling. The vision. The RAW image is there, yes. The cold, uncaring reality captured by the sensor and its software. But my joy! My joy is using that depth, that five-fold-magic, to express my moment in that day full of moments.
Wading... wading... I found them. Forty-five brackets. Forty-five sets of five ghosts, all capturing the sun as it climbed its morning ladder. And in that pile, I found success. I found the instant I craved: the rays of sunlight bursting around the entire corona. There.
The composition was good, satisfactory. The deeper canyon, sleeping below the White Rim sandstone, is visible. The rocks at my very feet are kissed with the first reds of refracted light.
The only fault, the single crack in the crystal, is the sky.
A sterile, steel-blue, cloudless sky. No texture. No grand galleons of vapor to make the morning interesting. It was an empty stage. The story of that morning wasn't up. It was down, in the fire pouring into the canyons below.
Within me, I was seeing the wonder of it all. I felt it. My hope, my ardor, are to find that wonder in my digital palette of digital information, my electronic paintbox, so I can share what I truly saw.
The post-processing continues. The sifting. The moments, the stories, they are just now unfolding, waking up, cascading like sparks, like memories, into the pages of that day lived out on the cliff's edge.
Thanks for stopping by for a read.
buzzshawphoto.com
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