Photography

Each evening as the pets wax needy, the caffeine wears off, and the house creaks as it cools, I think: I should blog. A pin-snip tightening in the solar plexus; I clamp down and I panic lightly and I know, for one, that I don’t have the margins of energy to tell the whole story of what January is or has been. For two, guilt. The longer I go blogless, the heavier the onus. Even this paragraph has made me lose a kilogram or two of psychic weight. So, in compromise, let’s slide narrower the window of recap to encompass only one subject: two presentations I gave this month.

Techniques of imaging the sky with some sort of camera progress from common sense to PhD within a single sentence. I know because I’ve spent weeks trying to find a conceptual, somewhat layman’s explanation of the basics, and keep getting mired in gearhead, Byzantine Web forums and scientific publications. I lament the absence of any sort of glossy, entry-level book explaining how to take photos of things in space at night, but I’ve come to realize that the reason that no such thing exists is that perhaps it cannot.

Emerging from my dazed over-stimulated WOW after several weeks, I can finally process the caliber of the stuff I saw floating around Europe for a month with David. First up is Djúpavík, an almost intolerably photogenic and surreal abandoned fishing village in far northwestern Iceland. To get there you drive along the Arctic Ocean on a tiny road and you feel like you’ve discovered something no one else has ever seen.