Chasing Geminids: Final

 "I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—which no other man can ever know.".

--Joseph Conrad 

Chasing Geminids: Signal, Noise, and the Veil

I have traversed the digital sediments, the raw images and the waveform files harvested from my evening out in the solitude of Rabbit Valley.

The mission was the Geminids. By traditional metrics, the mission was a failure. A weather system moved in, heavy and low, placing a layer of obscurity between my sensor and the ancient photons I was seeking. The diamonds were there, burning up in the mesosphere as they have for eons, but they remained behind a veil. I possess what the night gave me, but the expectation of a sky streaked with celestial debris was not met.

Instead of the vacuum of space, I captured the atmosphere of the Anthropocene. The clouds, sliding in from the East, acted as a projection screen illuminated by the sodium-vapor and LED glow of Grand Junction, over thirty miles away. In the high-dynamic-range composites, the stars are washed out and overwhelmed by the luminosity of the cloud cover. To the West, true darkness tried to assert itself, but the composition refused to resolve.

The intrusive light from Grand Junction, CO, illuminates the increasing cloud cover.

The Geophony of the Invisible

If the eyes were starved, the ears were fed.

I have spent hours wandering through the timeline of the audio captured by my rudimentary soundstage. It is a dense dataset. There is a persistent noise floor consisting of the low-frequency drone of distant rubber on blacktop from Interstate 70. It is a reminder that true silence is extinct. Cutting through that interference is the signal I wanted: the rustling of the high desert wind moving through the architecture of the flora.

When I moved the final complostion of directly over head toward the arms of he Milky Way the clouds had become a curtain obsura 

The wind played the Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) and the Rubber Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) like distinct instruments. The former produced a dry hiss while the latter offered a stiffer rattle.

There was no failure that night, only data. The visuals were dictated by the atmosphere, but the audio is now pure information. The failed Geminid hunt provided a baseline. I am now acting as the software engineer of my own art, filtering out the frequencies of tire rotation to find the truth remaining underneath.

The Engineering of Immersion

This is the reality at the ear before the brain intervenes. Our minds are aggressive filters that edit out the hum of the highway to focus on the solitude. The recorder does not edit. It captures the Signal and the Noise with equal fidelity.

Image of the Galactic Center, Paradox Valley, Utah. Oct, 2025
Nikon Z8, 14 mm, f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO 6400

The truth is a spectrum. It is the noise of condensed moisture obscuring the photon streams. It is the noise of tire compounds on asphalt, obscuring the sound of a cottontail chewing its last meal of the day. The joy of this work is not just the capture. It is the journey of interpretation.

To refine this capture, I have acquired a pair of matched Røde NT5 cardioid microphones. Off-the-shelf solutions rarely fit the specific architecture of my needs, so I have fabricated a custom stereo array. It consists of a 30 X 2.5 X0.125 inch stainless steel plate, room for two moveable microphone mount clamps.

This is the evolution of my Virtual Architect past manifesting in steel and aluminum. This array allows me to experiment with the stereo field by widening or narrowing the ears of the rig to match the optical field of view. All is rudimentary at this point, but improvements will reveal themselves.

The Complexity of the Capture

The variables of a photoshoot have expanded exponentially. I am no longer just looking for the leading line or the hyperfocal distance. I am hunting for the native soundscape.

The enjoyment is in the doing, but my mind races with the possibilities and the absurdities. In the stream of a subtle breeze, would I recognize a Jackrabbit’s sneeze? My imagination drifts to the idea of miking up a rabbit for live-action narration, or the ethics involved in trying to make a coyote sing on cue.

There is immense room for personal growth here. These Navy Gunners’ Mate ears, damaged by the percussive history of my youth, still have work to do. I have pages of notes for the next outing regarding how to configure the cardioids for a directional stereo image that rejects the highway drone. I also noted the necessity of gaffer tape. It is needed to lock down flapping cables that sound like thunder in a sensitive mic, and to secure the manual focus band on the lens. This mechanical lock prevents inadvertent movement from quickly numbing fingers and secures the focal plane during the inevitable recomposition of the visual frame.

The best notes, however, are the intangible ones. They are the realization that adding the dimension of soundscape does not just record a place. It simulates it. It helps me capture my personal moments in the continuous, uncaring cascade of deep time.

The Temporal Paradox: A Manifesto of Immersion

As I look toward the new year and the video production possibilities of the Nikon Z8 paired with the new Røde NT5 array, I am confronted with a new engineering challenge. It is not just about optics or acoustics. It is about the manipulation of Time itself.

My photography has always been about Deep Time, now working within the geological scale of the Colorado Plateau. Time-lapse is the perfect vehicle for this. It accelerates the slow rotation of the Earth so the human eye can witness it. It turns the slow drift of stratus clouds into a fluid dynamic stream and the Milky Way into a spinning carousel.

But sound operates on Human Time. It is immediate. It is visceral.

The Friction of Formats

Here lies the problem of Visual Time Compression versus Auditory Realism.

When I compress three hours of starlight into a twenty-second video clip, I am playing god with the clock. But I cannot do the same with the audio. Compressing three hours of desert wind into twenty seconds results in unusable white noise.

So, the challenge for the coming work is Decoupling.

I must treat the audio not as a synchronized soundtrack to the motion, but as the emotional anchor of the piece. The visual tells the viewer, "This is how the planet moves." The audio tells the viewer, "This is what it feels like to stand here."

The Engineering of the Soundscape Bed

My approach will be to capture Ambience Beds, which are long, uninterrupted recordings of the geophony (wind, water) and biophony (coyotes, crickets).

• The Visuals (The Z8 and D810): Capture the kinetic energy, such as the rushing clouds and the shifting shadows of the canyon walls. This appeals to the intellect as it shows the systems of the earth at work. One camera works to capture stills and real-time video while the other is working a time-lapse for a compressed dimension of the scenery.

• The Audio (The NT5 Array): Capture the static reality, such as the consistent, grounding thrum of the wind in the sagebrush. This appeals to the reptile brain as it tells the body where it is.

The trick will be in the mix. I cannot simply slap a wind track over a time-lapse. If a massive storm front rushes across the screen in the video, the audio must swell to match that perceived intensity, even if that specific gust of wind didn't happen at that specific second of the capture. I am no longer just a recorder. I am a conductor.

The Goal: Verisimilitude

This is where the Virtual Architect in me wakes up. In my past life building CAVE environments, we strove for immersion. We learned that if the eyes and the ears disagree, the illusion breaks.

My goal with these new experiments is to bridge that gap. I want the viewer to watch the stars wheel overhead at impossible speeds, yet hear the silence of the desert floor exactly as I heard it. It is a synthetic reality constructed from real data, designed to evoke the truest feeling of the place.

I am essentially building a time machine. The eyes travel fast. The ears stay present.

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