Photographic fun on a foggy night

Ghostly trees
London, ON, October 2007
[Click to embiggen]

Note: This is another image from my late-night walkabout through our foggy neighborhood. Please click here for the earlier blog entry.

There's something cathartic about being outside on your own with a camera when virtually everyone else is asleep. You stop thinking about the things on your to do list, the things you forgot to do yesterday, the appointments that await you the next day, the little nagging snippets of life that seem to fill your every waking hour.

Instead, you find yourself not thinking at all; simply reflecting on how quiet it is, how nice it would be if you didn't have to stay up late on a foggy night to experience this kind of solitude.

You're not on a clock, so you slowly walk from one block to the next, looking for just the right scene that will help you remember later on what it felt like to stand there in the still, damp air while the world around you seemed to be taking a much-needed rest.

That's one of the reasons I take as many pictures as I do: I use them to remember what it felt like to be in a certain place at a certain time. Long ago, I laughed at my high school art teacher when he called the camera a time machine. But now I realize he was right. This image brings me right back to that corner as it reminds me why we need to deliberately make the time to seek out moments like this in the first place.

Otherwise, we risk having no such reflective moments at all.

Your turn: What are you seeing when you peer deeply into this scene? Why do we look back at all?