Dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit! I still have no fucking time to work on posts! This is getting beyond annoying. I’d say I need to take a week off, but that wouldn’t actually work…
This week’s image from the mystical and timeworn days of early digital photography comes from the Scenic/Abstract folder, and shows a small marina in the Florida town that I lived within. Naturally I was struck by the string of lights on the small sailboat and took several different versions, some cropped tighter and not showing the distant glow in the sky at all. Right now, I’ll ask that you stop and look at it for a bit, see what kind of feelings and mood you get from it, to compare to my own impressions.
No, I’m serious. Stop here for a bit and look it over. Search your true feelings. Listen to your heart. Sounds about the same as always, doesn’t it? So okay, stop that and think with your brain instead.
All set?
So, I’m a little ill-defined on this one. There’s this contrast between the faint glow from the horizon, and the darkness where the boats are, broken (somewhat defiantly, to me) by those party lights. Yet there still seems to be no one around, though I’m not sure if I’m influenced by knowing the conditions at the time and not seeing a soul stirring anywhere while getting the shots. (Curiously, there’s a small dinghy moored to the sailboat that was drifting in the breeze/current, somewhat blurred in this pic, and in at least one of the other frames there’s a faint indication that there was someone in it, but I couldn’t begin to explain why.) I get this sense of foreboding from the horizon glow, with a bit of denial coming from the party lights. In the other shots without the horizon visible, there’s instead a sense of post-festivities, an island of warmth within the stillness of the marina itself.
So how did your impressions compare?
And now, to completely ruin the idea, I’ll tell you that this was shot from the bridge overpass of one of the major roads in the town, well-lit by streetlights, and nowhere near as serene as it appears here. I’m sure it eventually quieted down late at night, but it was hardly the kind of “listen to the water lap against the sides of the boat” conditions that you might have imagined.