When I drive home from Rebecca’s at night, I take the backroads. In the field before the hill going up to the rear entrance to my neighborhood, I’ve noticed some serious lightning bug activity, and I’ve been meaning to try to photograph it.
Well anyway, all I had to use was a Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, so I just tried various exposures at various apertures, sitting the camera on the hood of my car and using the “mirror lockup” custom function to prevent unnecessary shaking.
Brightness is a funny thing on monitors. I hope you guys can see these.
Of Lights that Go Before Men, and Follow Them Abroad In the Fields, by the Night Season, Colin Cheney (for 7/31)
poetry365:
The focal length is all wrong, I say
to the meteor shower.
Be calm, they say,
or the chimney swallows will steal
ember by ember
everything keeping you close to him
lying on the lawn, counting stars
shaken from the night’s branches
in summer storm.
I promise to pay the medical bill
for August’s sky: orbits of iron
pith & cloud-seed broken
against our atmosphere.
The telescope we built—
a cardboard tube, Teflon
& mirror—is a close for seeing
only what could have been,
can’t tell you anything
about this moment. Here, light
means destruction. A mattress
dragged across the wet field
means light. The swallows
ember in the chimney.
Lie still, the meteors say
above the apple’s barren
branches. Sometimes
the sky can only be torn apart
with the naked eye.
