Night Monkeys- Port Chalmers in the dark.

Yes, I know I keep starting these series of things that ultimately go nowhere.  Call the blog police.

And I stole that title from Jackass or something.  I am haunted by my own shortcomings.

A couple of weeks ago it was a full moon and both the lovely R and I were wandering around outside our house and along the Back Beach road with our respective cameras but no tripod because that's just how we roll in low light conditions; inadequately.  I blame Chinese astrology but it could just be that we are shiftless retards.

R just told me he had VR (vibration reduction) on his lens.  Fancy bitch.

For the moon pics I did eventually go round the back of the house and dig out a grass rake (if you'd seen the garden you'd know how long that took) so I could stand in the middle of the road in the dark with my camera balanced on a broken garden implement.

Interestingly, I was not moved to retrieve the perfectly excellent actual purpose-built tripod from under the bed. 

I am particularly pleased with this one (below left).  That's pretty much straight out of the camera.  Even the most static and mundane scenes become lycanthropic in the dark; this looks like some sort of haunted moor when it fact it is just a weedy old slope on an unkempt street 50 m from our house.  If we'd gone off overseas on some conspicuously purposeful hyperadult quest for inspiration like all serious artists are supposed to, we'd have missed it completely.  
"Sometimes the great hissing gulf between what is perfectly feasible and that which is not going to happen because you are too fucking lazy and perverse is electroplated with a very special kind of accidental gold." - Albert Einstein.

Einstein didn't say that.  But he thunk it.  

^ Hey, L'Heure Bleu.  It's often elusive to the photographer, rendering more as l'heure blerrrg or l'orange merdique.  I'm not a focal freak ( you might have noticed) so this image is perfectly okay with me.  This is looking down Otago Harbour toward Dunedin proper, although the town is hiding behind the hill.

The harbour can be an eerie place at night, especially in that sort of airless dead calm that happens under a full moon.  It is contained by hills that stretch all the way down either side of its sinuous flanks and somewhere out over the black water seabirds bark and croak and screech and wheel, though you can see neither them nor the marine largess of which they are partaking.  These familiar birds seem such diurnal creatures that you have trouble imagining their business continuing into the night, but it follows the tides and therefore the moon.  Our avian neighbours can see a range of ultraviolet cues invisible to us; how does the sea seem to them as they circle above in darkness- dressed with washes of luminous blue and green?  I really don't know, but it is a visual language to which we are deaf and blind.

I could spend a good few hours taking repetitive orange shots of streetlights at dusk, but R got to this one first ^  
Damn his eyes.

*  More of our pics here   *   Great stuff  from other people here   *

---