Late Night Discoveries

Post-Script: I always find myself immediately inspired to create something anew when confronted with creative visual stimulation, be it some experimental film or, in this case, my own past photographic work.

As a technical note, these images from last night hold up rather well, noise-wise, for having been created at ISO1600. It helps, of course, to have at hand an optically fast lens like the Lumix 20mm. And also, these narrow depth-of-focus images seem to require a bit of grit, noise-wise, to anchor one's eye. I'm not in that camp of ultra-high-ISO, noise-free photography, made possible only in recent years with the advent of newer sensor technology. I know enough about the medium - as informed by such writings as Sontag's "On Photography" - to know that the photograph and the thing being photographed are not the same thing. While we can suspend our disbelief momentarily so as to catch a faint glimpse of some recognizable reality in such images, they are intrinsically an abstraction; hence technical imperfections such as "noise" are nothing more than the artist's brush strokes, reminding us that, even with photo-realism, it's still a photo, and not the real thing.

I like the way that the camera's auto-white balance renders the warm tones of indoor illumination, a mix of compact florescent and incandescent. And the square-format fits these kinds of compositions nicely.

Typecast via Corona 4.

Bonus Images: Gallery of Late Night Discovery