I’m not sure I’ve showcased this shot on Wanderlust yet (though it’s not out of the question, I do lose track a little sometimes), but it’s one of my favourites- not to mention one of the oldest shots in my portfolio. The only tragedy being that it was shot on a cheesy little 2MP Olympus with less image quality than the [languishing] camera on my cell-phone. It was, as the blurb points out, a very happy accident.
This next shot was a happy accident by parts, in a similar vein. Only rather than appearing to be staring into deepest space, this one really is staring into deepest space.
Words can’t express how spectacular the Milky Way is at night time in a place with clear skies and no light pollution. In a thin copse in the Porongorup National Park in Western Australia in the depths of winter, I have been to a few places where atmospherics have been better for star-gazing, but I could count them off very quickly. It was, in short, spectacular.
I had neither a tripod nor a shutter-release cable, so I shot this long-exposure image with my finger holding down the button and the camera lying flat atop our rental car. My travel companion Pam was in the bathroom, and the light you see painting the trees red is from the bathroom window, faintly (I thought) spilling onto the underside of the branches. The faint orange glow is not a UFO but is in fact the same light flaring off the lens. And beyond that, millions upon millions of stars and galaxies.
This shot is not, obviously, the one I was trying to get. And I will shortly paste up a few more that I did get this night which were more in line with what I was trying for. However this photo falls neatly into the category of ‘happy accidents’ in that it somehow works as a wierd, abstract, ‘what the heck am I looking at’ sort of thing. At any rate, I like.
