half light

For a long time, I’ve admired photos that are shot in that space between sunset and night and I’ve never quite managed to be somewhere with a camera when it’s like that.

Over in stirling at the weekend i sat in my mum’s living room and dithered over going for a walk with the camera as the sun sank lower and lower below the line of mountains on the horizon, and just when i thought it was probably too late i made up my mind to go out. So we brought the wee doggie along for her first proper walk since the operation (removal of a tumour from her chest, the poor thing) and sauntered through the old graveyard next to the castle.

I had a shot at trying to capture that half-light as i saw it, which was tricky exposure-wise as my camera wanted to make everything like daytime so i switched to manual quite often, tricky to hold the camera steady with my shaky hands at less than 1/100 sec, and tricky to focus with a lack of contrasty edges and not being able to see much of anything through the viewfinder. But when i imported the pictures from the card and got a first look at them, i saw a glimpse of what i’d been hoping for.

I’m looking to push this further towards the vision in my mind, and it’s  difficult to stop myself from automatically trying to make it look like most of the other stuff i’ve ever done. Partly from pure muscle-memory, and partly from not knowing if i’m dancing to the beat of my own weird drum and half expecting someone to say ‘oh, but i loved it when you used to shoot that pretty and light stuff…’ because this isn’t what convention tells you is Good Photography. I’ll see what happens anyway, and you’ll probably have to endure a few more from this session on the blog over the next week or so.