Art of the Night freeway

                                                                                Curve & Swerve, Crockett, California, 2008

I used to spend a lot of time hanging out beneath freeways with my camera and tripod. I publically confessed once to this before was while giving a photo presentation to a class. The feedback was mostly sympathetic to my plight with overtones of derision here and there. Anyway, I used to hang out alone under freeways a lot. There is a world down there worth investigating,  of modern archeological - the future already came and took the automobile up way above overhead. Living in the east of the San Francisco Bay I was spoilt for choice of freeways to hang out underneath. The Oakland Maze dealing out it's wares to the Interstate 80, 580, 980, Hwy 24 East to West, or the  I-80 / 580 split, and on ramps, off ramps, etc, etc.. Big, mighty moulded elevated concrete structures built to stand the severest of earthquakes (although they still do fall down under extreme circumstances). It is odd to be under The  Maze always feels so disconnected from my daily passage along it's topside. The geography, landscape, reference points and ultimately the experience markedly different despite sharing the same coordinates on the map. Underneath the freeway is a land time has forgotten; quiet; still, always the graveyard shift. Meanwhile millions of cars and the people in them pour overhead on their way, to / from, coming or going, in transit between destinations. Energy abuzz and the dead space beneath.

View more of my freeway work

                                                                                        american truck stop, oakland, california

The One I Didn't Let Go

I cannot remember if I was on my way somewhere or simply cruising around in the golden hour, as I was wont to do with camera and tripod. When you have making photographs on the mind all the time, when it's what you do with the major portion of your time, then you see opportunities everywhere you go. Often as not you are behind the wheel when they sit up and say Hello, here I am, take me! Several split decisions burst in your head at once. Wah! That looks great. I need to stop. Should I stop? Break my forward momentum. No. I can go back later, I know where it is. But it will never be the same as it is now. The Moment is now. Are you truly devoted to photography? C'mon stop! Damn, that scene just looks perfect in the rear view mirror. Geeeeeeees......

And so it goes.

Often as not I would not stop, so propelled by the momentum of my car journey, my destination, my plans. When I did though I found that the ideal image I just clicked in my head while driving, as it flowed into my short term memory bank through the windshield and across the rear view mirror was not entirely how I saw it when I got the car parked and had my camera equipment in hand. Somehow the relationship my senses had with the scene had changed. The angle was different, the bits and pieces of the scene difficult to entangle, just nothing as straightforward as it had seemed.

Idealisation is a sort of optical illusion to the mind's eye. It constructs an ideal picture of what you thought you saw heavily influenced by the prospect of not being able to possess it. A desire unfulfilled. A psychological phenomenen that i'm sure has been studied and i'd be interested in reading. When you don't stop, you carry on, and it will be another great one you let go. The mind is like a rear view mirror, and it all looks great as it goes away.

This one didn't though.

Evidence in the Night

Light Footsteps

 I like to use light and long exposure in photography. Although often said that a photograph catches a fleeting moment it can be argued that the moment is not constrained to being fleeting. My long exposures range from seconds to occasionally hours. Largely I shoot static scenes for the long-exposure aesthetic I am drawn to. But it is also fun to play with moving sources of light within a long-exposure. They provide a form of evidence attesting to the presence of an entity and the character of it's movement. These incidental lights sources are literally illuminating the fact that an object has passed through the frame. Modes of transportation provide a rich vein of long-exposure light play. Running lights trace the contours of the roads, illuminating the aesthetic of their design. Airports too - evidence of the fluid movement and the steady hands that command wings and steel. As a night photographer I can also stage little scenes with small portable light sources - flash light, bike light, neon glow sticks etc in what is loosely referred to as light painting. In Light Footsteps you see the flash light creates my ghostly footsteps proceeding up the path, otherwise I'm invisible. Are these accurate representations of my subject or am I manipulating the truth? Well, I'm using the mechanism of the camera as another way of seeing. As an eye that senses and records a picture different to how the naked eye and mind would process it.
And I put my own little artistic spin on it for style.

Exit 13

A silentfoto?

  




                                                                                                                       Stay Centered, USA, 2008

What is silentfoto?

 Certain subjects and aspects that come about through the qualities produced in long exposure night photography work. The resulting image often possesses a stylistic quality. Other than that I'm not sure. An aesthetic? One guy praised me for my skills with cgi after I exhibited some of my silentfoto work at a local cafe. I probably tweaked the levels in LR a tad. Beyond this only a camera and tripod where involved. The above is a prime example of the silentfoto aesthetic from a Night Industrial collection. It was taken under part of a freeway maze in Oakland. I think the exposure was 30 seconds at 100 iso. There is no sense of normal, observable time to the scene and object (okay, there is a tail light streak - ignore), it's waiting in the darkness, inert, obsolete. It is in a time like that out in the universe - in slow, immeasurable stretches, often referred to a timeless. We do judge time by change, change by perceptible movement. Ironically I can see the the elevated highway decks and the rail track as 3 twisted clock hands extending from their centre point, the tanker. The thing about long-exposure work that dazzles me is how it uses illumination (to produce a certain quality) not through correct light strength but through the accumulation & subsequent compression of light over time on the electronic sensor. Aside from softening the image, the colours from this incidental sources of illumination are all the more vivid.