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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buzzshawphoto.com


All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Chasing Geminids, Part 2

 

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

        -- Joseph Conrad

The Geometry of Dark: Chasing Geminids (Part 2)

There are two BLM campgrounds in Rabbit Valley, ostensibly quiet places to park a truck and watch the universe rotate. The first is Jouflas, usually popular, and boasting a commanding view of the Wingate Sandstone as it plunges beneath the Mancos Shale along the Uncompahgre Escarpment. The second is the Knowles Overlook along the meander of the Colorado River.

My intent was simple: deploy the tripods here at Jouflas and use that plunging formation as a heavy, geologic anchor for the celestial production above. But in photography, as in geology, geometry is destiny. The topography here was not a shield, but a funnel; it allowed the high beams of passing traffic to slice straight into my wide-angle lens. I took a quick latitude and longitude reading, a habit of the trade, then packed up. The photons here were too aggressive. I needed to go deeper.

The Wingate Sandstone

I moved to a horse-trailer lot a short drive farther into the canyons, at the point where the BLM’s stabilization gravel surrenders to dirt. Here, I performed the "folded arm evaluation," standing still, tucking hands into armpits, and waiting to see if the light would be as quiet as the air.

It was full dark now. The sky was still clear, save for a few wispy clouds, the vanguard of a weather system I had been dreading. I scouted a foreground composition, but looking back toward the interstate, the geometry failed me again. A convoy of tractor-trailers painted lines of light across the horizon. It wasn’t enough luminance to hurt the human eye, but for a sensor pushed to ISO 6400, straining to collect light sent to us from stars millions of years old, it was blinding.

So, further south, the road requires focus.

I had not seen or heard a human soul since leaving the pavement. As I walked back to the truck, the silence was broken by a soft rustling in the sagebrush, jackrabbits, likely, utilizing the safety of the dark to secure an evening meal. I opened the back hatch and confirmed the location of the Zoom recorder and its tripod. I didn't just want to see the night; I wanted to capture the friction of it.

I drove south on Rabbit Valley Road, high beams carving a tunnel through the dark. In summer, this road is a river of silty moon-dust. Now, frozen solid, it was a washboard of hardened clay. The ruts didn't squish; they shattered. Navigating them required a specific focus, pick the wrong line, and you drop in, risking a cut sidewall or a broken axle. The 4Runner’s stock lights are well-designed, but I found myself missing the "big eyes" I installed at the front of my old T100, which could turn night into day at the flip of a switch.

The road firmed up in places as the underlying geology shifted, though low spots remain, basins filled with fine dust that turn to mire the moment they get wet. You could see the violence of the past season here: deep ravines where flash floods had eroded the gravel beds, and tracks where OHVs had blasted through the mud during the fall storms. Nature has her contours and will not be denied. Usually, the BLM grooms these routes so the Honda sedan crowd can reach the river, but not in December. The Knowles Overlook Campground was effectively severed from the civilized world for anything less than a high-clearance 4WD.

It is a different world, moving at night. You exist in a bubble of artificial lumens; anything beyond the throw of your headlights might as well be a void. Your best sensor becomes your ear until the lights die and the rhodopsin in your eyes regenerates.

I finally stopped at the McDonald Creek trailhead. I knew this spot. It was protected from the I-70 light pollution by both distance and the shielding topography. The entrance is marked by a massive, pale dome of Navajo Sandstone, a white monolith by day, but now a dark, imposing void outlined against the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way.

Navajo Sandstone Conical Feature

I was parking on a transition zone. Below me lay the Mancos Shale, the gray, crumbly sea-bottom mud that turns into grease when wet and concrete when dry. Above me rose the Navajo, the petrified dunes of a Jurassic desert. I was setting my tripod on a shoreline that hadn't seen water in a hundred million years, waiting to catch dust falling from an asteroid that was arguably older than the rock beneath my boots.

I began setting up the sound recorder first. Immediately, the biophony presented itself: a coyote, close by, yapping and tossing a few sharp barks in my direction. I’m not sure if the recorder caught the conversation or if I stepped on the audio by closing the 4Runner door. I’ll have to inspect the waveform in post-production, looking for the peaks of nature amid the machine's noise.

I switched my headlamp to red mode to preserve my night vision and let the darkness settle in. From here on, the world would be monochrome. I mounted the camera and walked out onto the flats.

I quickly noticed a tall ant hill, a conical mound piled high to insulate the colony. A side note for the curious: these mounds should always be inspected. Ants are the curators of the Mesozoic; they build with sand and fine gravel, often concentrating microfossils and bone fragments in their architecture. If you are hunting for fossils, the ant is your first and most reliable field assistant.

But I was here for the sky, not the dirt. It was 7:45 PM. The Milky Way was high above, though I could see wisps of light streaks painting the zenith. I chose a distant mesa as my foreground anchor, fired up the Nikon, and dialed in the physics: 14mm-28mm f/2.8 Zoom (set wide at 14mm), wide-open aperture set at 2.8, ISO 6400, 30-second shutter speed.

The interval timer was set to fire every 35 seconds. The intent, as always, was to stack these slices of time into a single image, revealing a conical cluster of meteorites raining down from the Gemini Twins Constellation.

I watched Orion’s belt rise, somewhat obscured by the horizon. To the east, a glow from Grand Junction filled the valley floor, light pollution bleeding around the edges of my foreground mesa. A bad omen. I adjusted the composition, placing Orion to the right, hoping to catch the cone of meteor streaks.

At 20:12, I released the interval timer and stepped away.

I looked back at the audio setup. Two small red LEDs on the Zoom recorder stared back at me; it was collecting data from a different spectrum. I had an EcoFlow River battery sitting on a silicon mat to keep the electrons flowing; the standard AA batteries get sketchy in this cold. The X-Y microphone, covered in its "dead cat" fuzzy windscreen, was listening for the wind, the coyotes, and perhaps the silence itself.

I stood in the crisp, flowing air, refreshing my memory of the constellations, using the old night patrol trick of averted vision, looking slightly to the side of the Navajo Sandstone formation to let the light hit the rods in my eyes, revealing the faint glow of the rock.

The Milky Way was a majestic arch overhead. The Galactic Center was currently beneath my feet, looking down on Australia, but the spiral arms were here with me. Airplanes moved across the starfield, their navigation lights blinking in a rhythmic, mechanical counterpoint to the stars. Those streaks would show up in the 30-second exposures, man-made meteors.

But the geometry turned against me once more.

Looking East, where my camera was slowly drinking in the light, I saw wisps of high clouds being chased by lower, heavier masses. They were creeping up over the horizon of the mesa, illuminated from below by the city lights of Grand Junction. The clouds acted as a diffuser, scattering the city's glow and drowning out the starlight. Orion the Hunter was being erased.

I let the camera run its intervals until 2100, then conceded the battle. I moved the tripod, shifting to Plan B: a composition directly overhead, aiming for the zenith where the air was still clear. The peak of the Geminids was predicted for the window between midnight and 0200, but the atmosphere had other plans. The clouds moved with a slow, suffocating inevitability from the southeast, closing the dome.

A little after 2200, I finally switched my headlamp from red back to bright white—a harsh return to modern time. I opened the hatch. The temperature was down to 34°F. It was that specific, tactile cold where you are acutely aware of the exact location of your hands and cheeks.

The sound recorder went in first. The aluminum legs of its tripod were coated in a web of frost, the moisture of the high desert crystallizing as the earth vented some of its residual heat. It flows away, but too subtly for one to notice. I found the same delicate lattice on the camera’s view screen as I collapsed the gear. I performed a final inspection, ensuring the vibration of the rutted road wouldn't rattle the optics apart on the drive back to the interstate.

You cannot force the sky to cooperate, nor can you negotiate with a cloud bank fed by the winter winds. The data capture was possibly a failure. The "hero shot" of the Geminids raining fire over the mesa may not exist on my memory card.

But as I navigated the ruts back toward the pavement, leaving the silence of the canyon for the hum of I-70, I didn't feel a sense of loss. There is a victory in simply being there. You can’t lose when you have the excuse of photography to stand under a diamond dome in the cold, listening to the breathing of the planet. It isn't about the capture; it’s about the witness.

The final image might not be what I planned, but the raw materials, the frost, the coyote's bark, the wind in the dead cat, and the few photons that did make it through the clouds are now mine. Later, in the warmth of the studio, I’ll sift through the digital strata of the evening. I will look for the hidden jewels in the noise, and perhaps find that the story wasn't about the meteors after all, but about the night itself.

(To be continued...)
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Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com


All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Chasing Geminids, Part 1

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness"

             ---The Heat of Darkness: Joseph Conrad

Chasing Geminids: The Art of the Go/No-Go

Life is in the doing.

I  consider Saturday night’s photography adventure a success. Not necessarily because the sky opened up and rained celestial fire upon my camera’s sensor, we will get to that later, but successful because I loaded the gear, turned the key, and went.

I found a spot in Rabbit Valley that had everything a man could need: complete darkness, a dramatic foreground of silence-weathered sandstone, and even a BLM pit toilet.

The toilet was locked for the season, of course. In a way, this was a mercy. With the temperature hovering near freezing, the plastic seat would have been a ring of jagged ice, precariously perched over a deep, dark pit of stewing human waste.

I always prepare in the days leading up to a remote shoot, so I never need a BLM pit. I time my personal consumption so the need will never come for a "plop." Sometimes those pits fill up to the point where a splash is possible. Think about that.

Down there, a subterranean cauldron of a billion bacteria was busy metabolizing the sins of past tourists, generating a faint and stifled heat. But the padlock was there, and the need was not. That biological reactor was safely sequestered from the crisp night air, and I was saved from the temptation of comfort.

The weather forecast was, to put it mildly, "optimistic" only if you enjoy looking at gray cotton. The predictions called for a transition from clear skies to 75% cloud cover right around the time the meteors were scheduled to arrive. A rational systems engineer would look at that data probability and stay home.

But I decided to take the challenge. The forecast is just a model. The sky is the reality.

The Vessel

I chose the 4Runner for this sortie, leaving the T100 in the stable. The 4Runner is the superior craft for navigating unknown planetary surfaces or rocky, muddy dirt roads, and it offers plenty of cargo space for my photography necessities. More importantly, it has heated seats.

The tortured roads I found were no longer muddy; they were frozen, tire-sized canyons where other travelers had misjudged the weather and abused the surface. The mud in places had calcified into ruts deep enough to swallow a wheel. The low channels intended for normal runoff had eroded into gullies, made passable only by the final accumulation of gravel deposited when the turbulence ended.

The BLM will be spending our tax dollars trying to repair the damage for next year's season. Lesson to all: watch the weather, and move out before the storm gods visit.

The temperature was predicted to stay above freezing, but anyone who has spent time in the high desert knows that "above freezing" is a technicality. When you are standing still, staring at the sky, waiting for a rock to burn up in the mesosphere, the cold moves in on you. It is a physical weight. It crawls up your body like a silent, white-streaked blue snake, then sits on your shoulders. It always lets you know it is there.

The Payload

I loaded my familiars about an hour before dark. These are my sensors, tuned to capture the spectral layers for the upcoming event.

• Optics: Tripods, cameras, lenses cleaned to invisibility.
• Comms: A full spectrum of radios including CB, GMRS, and HAM. With me to help me stay safe, and I like to listen to the chatter of the world while I leave it behind.
• Sound Gear: The field recorder. I brought it to capture the audio signature of the dark—the ability to hear what I saw.
• Survival: Layers of wool and down, water, snacks, and a sleeping bag rated for twenty below zero. Or at least, it was rated for that ten years ago. Now it might just be a very cozy bag for "chilly."

It is a habit born of experience. Always bring enough gear to survive the night you didn't plan to have.

Departure

I topped off the gas tank, another habit, and merged onto I-70 heading West. The interior of the 4Runner was a dense tetris of technology and survival gear, a mobile capsule designed to sustain life and capture light in a hostile environment.

The cockpit. Controlled chaos. Somewhere in there is a camera that can see the past, and a sleeping bag that remembers when it was rated for twenty below.

As I drove, the dashboard confirmed what my skin already knew. The numbers were dropping, and the desert was still exhaling last summer’s stored heat into the coming night.

The data point. It’s not cold yet, but the trend line is clear. The desert is exhaling.

Dusk was bruising the light and the horizon was flowing purple when I saw my exit. The goal was to leave the humming ribbon of interstate commerce behind and plunge into the silence.

The off-ramp. Leaving the light stream of civilization for the dark stream of Ra9bbit Valley.

My destination was Rabbit Valley, the gateway to the McInnis Canyon National Conservation Area. It is familiar ground. I have been there a hundred times to photograph the long shadows of the sun.


But I had never gone in for the stars. As I turned onto the dirt, the last light of the day was putting on a show that rivaled anything the meteors might offer later. The sky remained clear as the horizon rimmed in a final defiant gasp of color before the monochrome of night took over.

The preamble. The sun’s final, dramatic argument against the coming dark

I drove toward the interior, aiming to put the streaming light pollution behind me. I had a specific geologic feature in mind. It was a silent and weathered sentinel of sandstone that I hoped would anchor the composition.

The intended target. A silence-weathered spire waiting to be paired with celestial fire. But as any field geologist knows, the map is not the territory.


That, at least, was the plan.

The Oil Field Education

I spent over ten years in the Oil Patch. It was a previous life where I wasn't looking up at the stars, but down into the crust. I worked on exploration semi-submersible rigs and land rigs from Northern Vermont to Alabama.

I mention this not to polish my resume, but to explain why I pack the extra water, the food, and the radio. I have spent many winter nights sitting in the front seat of a Jeep or a Bronco in a blinding snowstorm, waiting for a drilling rig to chew its way through another ten feet of rock.

Sure, I was with the crew at the well site, but the transit, moving to the next rig I was supervising, was a solo affair. It meant miles of solitude, driving over board roads and icy backcountry mud to remote locations. There, I would sit and wait for the "cuttings sample" to arrive at the surface so I could peer at it through a microscope and log the geology, always marking the well's progression as it ate its way deep into time.

I have "sat on" wells that were 4,000 feet deep and wells that went to 27,000 feet. Each one with ten foot narratives describing the details of the recovered drill bits rock fragments. There is a specific kind of solitude and awareness when you are that deep in the wilderness, or the ocean, waiting for the earth to reveal a secret. You develop habits. You learn that the cold is patient. You learn that if you are alone, you can take risks because you trust your own grit to get you to morning. But if you have a passenger, someone who hasn't experienced the long and worrisome night, you keep that risk close to zero.

Navigating the dark

.

Tonight it was just me. So the risk of being tens of miles from any hardtop road was acceptable. I was prepared to wait for a sunrise if needed, but I was waiting for the rocks of Gemini to fall.



(To be continued...)
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buzzshawphoto.com


All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

The Geminid Protocol

 

“My god, it’s full of stars”
           – Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Architecture of Falling Stars:

A Geminid Protocol

The morning light is flat and grey, but my mind is already twelve hours ahead, standing in the dark of the moon.

Dreaming of Things to Come

I was up early, running the mental subroutines: weather patterns, power consumption, thermal regulation. Tonight, I do not just observe; tonight, I hunt.

The target is the Geminid meteor shower. Unlike the Perseids, which are trails left by a comet, the Geminids are the debris of an asteroid known as 3200 Phaethon. We are waiting for the Earth to drift through a cloud of rocky dust, allowing me to capture geology in motion. It is deep time, burning up in the atmosphere at seventy-nine thousand miles per hour.

Because this debris comes from a "rock comet," it is denser than the usual ice and fluff. It is grit and stone. If I am lucky, I may capture a "green" streak. That isn't just a color; it is Magnesium vaporizing. A yellow trail is Sodium. I am not solely photographing light; I am photographing the elemental composition of an asteroid interacting with our atmosphere. It is spectroscopy at 79,000 mph.

There is a temporal vertigo to this work. The light hitting the camera’s sensor from the background stars left them over 1,000 years ago. The light from the meteor is instantaneous; it is born and dies in a fraction of a second. I will be simultaneously recording the deep past—the stars—and the immediate present—the meteor. It is a collision of timescales on a single silicon wafer.

I will be working under a theater of perspective geometry. The meteors don't actually come from the constellation Gemini; that is just the "Radiant." It is an optical illusion of parallel lines converging in the distance, exactly like driving through a snowstorm at night where the flakes seem to originate from a single point in the headlights. I will be capturing a 3D tunnel effect on a 2D sensor.
The Logistics of Immersion

The process sounds deceptively simple, a linear script: set the tripod, mount the glass, point East. But as any systems architect knows, the devil is in the dependencies.

I am treating the truck not just as transport, but as a mobile command unit. I need to verify the roads in Rabbit Valley. We had rain weeks ago—fluid dynamics carving temporary canyons into the dirt. I need to ensure those ruts haven't hardened into unpassable barriers. I need a foreground that speaks the same language as the sky, perhaps a sandstone mesa or a silence-weathered spire to anchor the composition.

Today is for the hardware.

• The Sensor: The Nikon Z8, my primary array.
• The Power: The EcoFlow River, fully charged. The heartbeat of the operation.
• The Glass: The 14mm f/2.8. I will clean it until it is invisible, removing every speck of dust so that the only artifacts in the image are the ones burning in the upper atmosphere.

The Celestial Alignment

When the sun drops and the thermal gradient shifts, I will set the trap.

I will use Orion the Hunter as my Sentinel. He will stand guard on the right of the frame. I will pull focus until Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—the three kings of the Belt—resolve from fuzzy blobs into piercing, distinct points of light.

Then, the data capture begins.

• Manual Mode. Control is absolute.
• ISO 6400. High sensitivity to catch the faint whispers of light.
• The Shutter. 30 Seconds. Long enough to soak in the volume of the dark, short enough to keep the stars from streaking into rain
• The Interval. Every 35 seconds, the shutter will fire. A metronome of mechanics in the silent desert.

The Wait: Biophony and Static

I plan to let the system process for three hours. This is where the Software Engineer meets the Virtual Architect.

If the sky holds, I will return with a massive dataset, a stack of raw information that will need to be rectified, cleaned, and combined. It is a construction project; I am building a composite reality where every meteor that fell over three hours exists simultaneously in a single, frozen moment.

When I’m back home in my virtual darkroom, I will be running a batch process on this data. I am looking for specific events, the meteors, midst a sea of constants, the stars, and noise.

In those thousands of frames, there will be intruders. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, passing airplanes, and high-altitude clouds. Post-processing is not just "editing"; it is debugging the sky. I will run a routine to reject the outliers. The stars follow a predictable algorithm known as sidereal motion. The meteors follow a chaotic but vector-based logic. The satellites are the "glitches" in the rendering of the night.

My job is to parse the data, refine the signal-to-noise ratio, and compile a "clean build" of the reality I stood in. The art will be found in deciding what to keep as an aesthetic and what man-made traces to ignore. Some intruders may serve as visual features; others are bugs to be rejected. I may end up with treasures, or I may fail and return with unusable data.

While the camera works, I will exist in the cold. The temperature will hover above freezing, but out here, the wind has teeth. I will be bundled in thermals and puffies, retreating to the truck cab to run the engine, just a burst of heat, then silence again.

I’ll have a book, a notebook, and my HAM radio. I want to listen to the bands. Sometimes, you can hear the meteors reflecting radio waves, crackling wooshes, a ping from the void, a ghost in the static. The silence of Rabbit Valley won't be true silence. It will be a mix of the wind’s Geophony and the radio’s Technophony.

The Variable of Luck

I aim to be set up by 21:00 and wrapped by midnight.

Of course, clouds are expected to be moving in. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, and nature is indifferent to my planning. It may all fail. I may come home with nothing but cold hands and an empty gas tank.

But that is the practice. You prepare the gear, you calculate the angles, and you stand in the dark waiting for the universe to blink. Even if the clouds win, the planning is good practice. The rocks aren't going anywhere. I will have spent an evening out in the silence with the Winter stars and my thoughts.

And in that sense, there is no chance of failure.

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Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

 

"In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream... Life, what is it but a dream?"
                                                                               --Lewis Carroll

Of Daydreams and Meditations:

The Architecture of Silence

Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park. Nikon D810 Panorama

It was never really about the picture. A photograph is a slice, a flat thing, a breathless instant trapped in two dimensions. But the world is not flat, and time does not hold its breath.

When I am out there, boots in the dirt, I am working in a complete environment. The static image is a lie of omission; it leaves out the wind, the heat, and the hallowed emptiness. But the digital age has given us new canvases. Social media is often dismissed as ephemeral, a river of noise, but I see it as a portal. It allows me to return to my roots in virtual environments, only this time, I am adding the invisible layer that makes the unreal feel real: Sound.

In my former life, inside the CAVE, that humming cathedral of virtual prototyping, we built worlds out of polygons, projected light, and three-dimensional sound. We were architects of the unreal, trying to convince the human mind it was standing somewhere it was not. We chased verisimilitude like a ghost. Now, out here on the Western Slope, skin dusty with the erosion of the Jurassic, I am chasing it again. But the tools have changed. The data is no longer synthesized; it is captured.

The seasons here are physical weights. In summer, the heat presses against the back of your neck, a heavy hand reminding you that the sun is not just a light source, but a nuclear reactor. My Nikon Z8 sits on the tripod, baking. It is a hungry machine, devouring light, shifting pixels to catch the impossible detail of sandstone and sage.

In winter, the world inverts. The days are bone, chilling, the nights razor-sharp. I stand shivering under the clear skies, capturing meteors burning up in the atmosphere, chasing the cold light of stars. But whether I am sweating or freezing, the visual data is only half the architecture.

To truly rebuild this place for you, I must capture the air itself.

So, I bring a new listener to the canyons: a 4-channel audio recorder. It sits like a strange monolith among the scrub, its ears pricked for the things our eyes ignore. We talk of silence in the desert, but true silence is a vacuum, and nature abhors it. The "silence" of the Colorado Plateau is actually a symphony of the unseen. I am learning the taxonomy of the air, capturing it in stereo, and molding it into three dimensions.

My last shoot was at the edge of the Wingate Sandstone cliffs, in the Island in the Sky region of Canyonlands National Park. Standing there, I looked out over sixty miles of remnants, layers of geologic time stripped bare. One hundred and twenty million years stared back at me at a glance.

This vastness unlocks my personal knowledge system. I can hear the ghost of evolution’s progression in the canyon below. If I could capture my internal theatre—the feeling of standing on that precipice of deep time—I would. But my tools are only light sensors and microphones. So, I try to express that internal stage using the whispers in the wind.

The Internal Theatre: Visualizing the ghosts of the Jurassic that still haunt the acoustic landscape.

I feed these sounds into the digital loom of DaVinci Resolve, relearning skills I haven't touched in years. Here, the software engineer reawakens. I am not just editing; I am designing a system of sensory input. I navigate the still landscapes with video technique, panning across the high-resolution stasis of the Z8 files, letting the camera drift like a hawk's eye, syncing the movement to the swell of the wind.

My goal is to send you two kinds of transmissions. The first are Daydreams: short, arresting moments designed to interrupt the scroll of your day and transport you, if only for a heartbeat, to the edge of the rim. The second are Meditations: longer architectures of time that allow the reality of the space to settle in, sharing not just what I saw, but sounds in the volume of the air I breathed.

When you stand before the final piece, I don't just want you to see the red rock. I want you to hear the Geophony rise up like a tide through your headphones. I want the wind to brush past your ear. I want to pull you out of your chair and drop you right here, into the heat and the dust, where the world is loud and alive and older than we can comprehend.

We are not making pictures. We are building ghosts of the real world, and sound is the heartbeat that makes them walk.

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Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Approaching Verisimilitude

Not all those who wander are lost
             -- Bilbo Baggins

The eye is a greedy child; it swallows the world whole. The red rock, the blue sky, the infinite horizon. But it is not enough. It creates a picture, yes, but not a sense of ‘place’. To truly summon the ghost of reality, to build that shimmering mirage called verisimilitude, you must open the door for the ear. You must let the sound in. For in my mind, the visual is a half-finished sentence, and only the subtle sound of the wind can put a period at the end of it.

I was not always a hunter of this open-air silence. In a former life, I was a weaver of electric dreams, a builder of walls made of light. During my years at Virginia Tech, I served as the VP for Production and Development for an enterprise called Virtual Prototyping and Simulation Technologies. We worked in the CAVE,  a recursive acronym, a womb of 3D projection screens, speakers, a Silicon Graphics Supercomputer, and computer code, where we tried to teach the human mind to believe in worlds that did not exist. The SGI system we used was called the Silicon Graphics Onyx Infinite Reality Monster for a reason.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-CAVE-at-Virginia-Tech_fig1_277847174).

It was the dawn of the digital immersive virtual reality age, the early days, but we were planting the seeds. If you look now at the great, glowing ‘Sphere’ in Las Vegas, you are looking at the grandchild of our research. We were the ancestors of that immersion, wrestling with the basics of 3D projection and spatial sound, taking on the incredible technical challenge of fooling the senses. The torch has since been passed to companies like Mechdyne, who gathered up those patents and technologies to keep the dream growing, but back then? Back then, it was us, and other teams in universities around the world, immersed in the creativity and deep in the hum of the machines.

https://www.mechdyne.com/

I tell you this history so you understand the machinery of my own head. When I stand out on the Colorado Plateau today, camera in hand with the geology around me, I am still that virtual architect. I am not just taking a picture; I am building a simulation of the soul.

I shoot panoramas because they crack open the visual space; they let the viewer step inside the volume and perspective. But the picture remains silent, and the desert is never truly silent. To fill that gap, to cement the "place" in your memory, I have turned to soundscapes.

At first, I tried to catch the wind in a simple computer, a cellphone with a stereo microphone capsule clipped to its back like a mechanical beetle. It works at one level. But the sun, that great, copper penny burning in the vast sky, has no patience for delicate things. Out here, when the heat rises to a fever of 100°F in the open light, the phone gasps and dies, retreating into the sleep of overheating.

So, I have upgraded my arsenal. I now carry a four-channel recorder, a beast that does not fear the noon sun, with a set of microphones that allow me to experiment, to place ears in the grass and ears in the air.

And what am I listening for? I am listening for the symphony of the wild, broken into movements.

I hunt the Geophony, the voice of the earth itself. The sound of wind fluting through the sandstone ribs of a canyon, the groan of rock expanding in the heat, the sudden rush of water, the very friction of the air against the planet.

I hunt the Biophony, the living choir. The frantic, paper-dry rustle of a lizard in the sagebrush. The chitter of the pinyon jay.

Along with the soundscapes and the still images, I am weaving in time-lapse and real-time video. It is a full capture, a net thrown over reality. I will share these gleanings on social media for those who wish to step into the frame.

I smile at the irony of it, standing there with my headphones and my high-tech array. I come to the Plateau because I love the quiet. I viscerally enjoy the silence. But in that silence, there are actors on my stage. My actors are the breezes blowing through the undergrowth, the occasional hawk circling the thermal, and yes, even the fly-by insects, whining their electric tune as they search for a blood meal.

It will all be there in the headphones. If I can hand you a photograph, and with it, the sound of the air flowing over a crow’s wing as he dives near looking for a meal, if you can feel that wind on your neck, then I have succeeded. I have rebuilt the world, and you are standing in it.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved