For a few days toward the end of October, there was some fuss about turning back our clocks one hour. The running complaint focused on days getting shorter even though we “gain” an hour of time. Early darkness just made things, well, darker, physically and qualitatively; it gets darker outside and for some, darker within one’s psyche.
I suppose I’m the odd person out; I shouldn’t “suppose” as I am an odd person with such things. Sunsets that announce evenings arriving earlier is not a big deal for me. Like some form of line dancing flitting across the horizon, once again daylight and night trade places, and time marches on without losing a single beat.
Whether it’s 4:30 in the afternoon or 8:30 at night, I don’t tire of sunsets. Some are dramatic in their intensity and expanse, others are less so, their palate of warm colors as soothing and inviting as those found in an impressionist painting.
There’s nothing standard about this light that quickly dissolves into shadows of dark blue and greys. The one constant I’ve felt through the years has been the brevity of the light which morphs an hour before and up to sunset. The times are few when I don’t have a camera by my side, yet on those days when I don’t, I sometimes forget about today’s most ubiquitous of cameras, the ones found in today’s smartphones. And they are amazing tools for photography, videography and more.
The photograph shown here was taken within that half-hour before sunset. The way the light and shadows shifted was a process all too short, perhaps as short as the traffic light that changed to green shortly after I took one photo. Figures. The one time I hoped for a few more seconds stopped at a red light just wasn’t there.
For the various times we use our phones to take a photo, we hope that one shot becomes the money shot. We want just one, a really good one, which connects with everything and anything that courses through our thinking and feeling. I relish the feeling of making this particular shot. The stoplight, the headlights, the reflections on the car hood, the gradations of orange and yellow, blue and grey are a surprising though welcome confluence of order.
A confluence of order. We can use some of that in the here and now regardless of whatever time or GMT standards we’re in.
Carlo Centeno 