ISO 6400 f/2.0 1/60 sec

Out In The Dark

The darkness changes the world.

It pulls it tight. Stretches it thin. Covers it like an old blanket, heavy and worn. It’s strange, the way it feels. But I like it. It lets me find things like this.

A house, half-built. Bricks stacked, a tarp loose in the wind. In the daylight, it’s nothing. Just a job site. But at night, it’s different. At night, it looks like it doesn’t belong here. Like it’s from somewhere else. Abandoned. Forgotten.

I saw it and knew there was a picture in it. I didn’t know why, not at first. But I stood there, looking. It was the mess of it. The tools left behind. The dirt smeared across the ground. The marks of men who worked hard but didn’t stop to see what they’d made. And then there was the light. One single light, fighting to hold back the dark.

That’s what I saw. Maybe it’s just me. But photography isn’t about what’s there. It’s about what you feel. And this felt alive. Quiet and strange, but alive.

People pass by things like this all the time. They don’t see them. They don’t look. And maybe that’s why I do. To find the beauty in what’s left behind. The plain things. The ones on the edge of ugly, but not quite there.

It wasn’t easy, this one. The dark was heavy, and the light was stubborn. Getting it right was hard. The kind of hard that’s good. The kind that makes you want to try again.

The darkness changes the world, yes. But the pictures are still there. You just have to see them.