Doing a little recordkeeping last night, I found that I already have 190 posts for the year, not counting this one, while last year’s total number of posts was 233, a personal record (the dumbest kind of record.) That means, in order to beat this number, I’d have to post at least 44 more times, or eleven posts per month. Given that I’m still doing the Profiles posts and there are 20 more of them, that’s a mere 24 of other, quality content to go. That’s like, pssshhffftt. I mean, we all know there will be posts showing the mantids mating and laying eggs, and the green flash on video, and a tornado and the aurora borealis (perhaps together,) so, yeah, no sweat.
Granted, one of those posts was The Manatee’s, so if I want to get technical, I have to have at least one more than that to count as mine – perhaps more if said The Manatee appears again, which I cannot rule out at this time. Ohh no, now the pressure’s on! Yeah, whatever.
Given all that, what we have for this post is a negative scan prepared when I knew I was about to leave on that trip… somewhere, up north, I forget where… but ran out of time to actually do the post, and it’s been sitting in the blog folder since then, staring at me, taunting me, wheedling in that annoying little voice negative scans have (you know exactly the one.) I thought it was kinda cool, and it represented an easy post to write, and I knew I would be uploading it sometime before the end of the year anyway, so there you go.
An experimental shot from nearly twenty years ago while I lived in Florida, this one came out amazingly well, the variety of colors far better than imagined – clicking on it, by the way, will open a larger version in a new window. I touched out the obvious bugaboos from long exposures, but left the grain intact, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the grain wasn’t that bad in the first place (much better than some films I’ve used,) and I consider it just a character of the image, indicative of film in the first place, which makes the colors of the lights that much more impressive. The second reason being, clearing the grain by filtering or blurring within a color selection would either have to be limited to the clear sky/water areas meticulously, or it would end up eradicating some of the finer details like the trailing ends of the reflections or the arms of the starbursts, and that was unacceptable. By the way, this was long before LEDs were in routine use on streets and buildings, so they’re not the source of all the colors, but this is facing a business district, so you’re probably seeing lots of advertising stuff. Only a guess at exposure time (about 30 seconds) because there’s no EXIF info to check, but I kinda wish I’d framed a little differently to get that sailboat on the left edge into the shot better, though to be honest, I may not have even known it was there. I was shooting from a well-lit causeway (you can see the edge plants peeking in, lit by those sodium streetlamps) and my eyes were adjusted to that lighting, so the unlit sailboat might have been lost in the darkness, only revealed against the faint skyglow in the longer exposure.
This is the Indian River Lagoon, which has appeared often enough before, and you’re looking at the city of Melbourne, Florida. Maybe someday, I’ll return to this spot and reshoot it in digital, just for comparison. Not as a special, dedicated trip, mind you, just if I happen to be in the area. Unless you want to fund it out of curiosity?