Some Photos Just Won't Wait Their Turn

I have a pile of photos to edit. Hundreds of them.

Some of them go back to Capitol Reef last fall. They have been sitting on a hard drive for the better part of a year, patiently waiting their turn, like a very polite line at a deli where I am both the only customer and the world’s slowest employee. I’ll get to them. I always do, eventually. If you read my last confession on this subject, you know that “eventually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

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But here’s the thing about a backlog. It is not democratic.

Most of the photos wait. They sit in their folders, unbothered, taking their place in line. But every so often, a handful of images refuse to do that. They push to the front. They knock on the inside of the hard drive and say, politely but firmly, me first, please. You know the ones. You knew it the moment you took them. Sometimes it’s because the picture caught something that genuinely touched you and you can’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes it’s just that bone-deep photographer’s certainty — that quiet little this one’s good that you feel before you’ve even looked at the back of the camera.

The danger, of course, is the hope. You always hope they’re as good as you thought they were when you took them. Sometimes you get to the computer and the magic leaked out somewhere on the drive home. But sometimes — sometimes — they’re exactly what you knew they’d be.

These five were exactly what I knew they’d be.

You might remember from my last post that I spent a night out under the stars in the Great Basin, somewhere out where Oregon and Idaho and Nevada can’t quite agree on a border. These are what came back.

The Green Hours

The first two are the Milky Way, but look low, at the horizon. That green glow isn’t a color cast or a processing trick. That’s aurora, painting the bottom of the sky. And check out the reflection of the sky reflecting off the lake.

Here’s the part I still can’t get over: I could not see this with my own eyes. Standing there in the dark, the green simply wasn’t there for me. Even with it being so exceptionally dark that you could see more white stars than black areas. I mean this place was DARK. But the camera could see it — it gathers light over time in a way the human eye can’t — and when the first frame came up on the back of the screen, glowing green at the edges, I actually said something out loud to the empty desert. I think specifically I said, “Oh shit, that’s awesome!” I knew right then these two were going to be special.

There’s something humbling about a camera seeing more than you can. You stand in a landscape thinking you’ve taken it all in, and the machine quietly informs you there was a whole color show happening that your own eyes weren’t equipped to attend.

3:30 in the Morning

I rolled over at about 3:30 in the morning — I was, I should remind you, sleeping in a car — and the moon was coming up over the lake.

It was an almost-new moon, just the thinnest sliver lit along the bottom. But here’s what I love, and have always loved: you can see the rest of it. The whole dark round of the moon, faintly visible, lit by light that bounced off the Earth and back up to it. Earthshine. The sun lights the sliver; the planet lights the rest. You’re seeing the entire moon by two different lights at once, and one of those lights is the reflection of the very ground you’re lying on.

I lay there in the open hatch of a Toyota and watched it climb. Some mornings the office is very strange and very good.

For the Astrology Friends

The last one looks, at a glance, like a nice quiet shot of a couple of bright stars over a tree line just as the sky was getting dark that night.

They are not stars. Those are two planets: Venus and Jupiter, in conjunction, riding low together just before they slipped below the horizon. The two brightest planets in the sky, paired up for a brief window and then they were gone. They were joined by Mercury too. All of them in the sign of Cancer. It was not only cool to see, it was good stuff to feel too.

Venus is the planet of beauty and Jupiter is the planet of abundance. Mercury is the planet of communication. So I guess this article is a great summary of all that: we had beauty, abundance and, well, it all got shared with you when the photos jumped the line to get out of the camera.

Back to the Line

So those are the five that jumped the queue.

The hundreds of others are still waiting. Capitol Reef is still down there in the folders, tapping its foot. I’ll get to all of it eventually — eventually, that hardworking word — but I don’t feel too bad about letting these five cut to the front. Some images come out of the camera already knowing what they are. The least I can do is not make them wait.

The rest of you, back in line. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

The Slightly Moody Creative is the work of Joe English — fiction, music, and photography, told across the American West. See all of it at slightlymoody.com.

Find me on Instagram at @slightly_moody_creative.