If I had to choose, I’d say that the best part of writing for this blog personally is having time set aside weekly where I get to shoot anything that I want to, and this week’s installment is no exception. I’ve definitely written about my adoration for night photography before on this blog, and I’m not sure if I have much new to say about it, but I guess I could try.

To me, shooting at night is one of the purest settings to exist as a photographer. Inherently, a camera makes you an observer, with the ultimate level of separation determined individually, but an observer nonetheless. At night, even without a camera, I feel like an observer; like the world I am in is somehow new and different. It creates an environment that is familiar, but also foreign; conditions that I find I am typically most comfortable with. This suggests the observation is also part of what makes the nighttime so conducive to photography.

In another sense, light is much more readily fixated upon when its environment is nearly a vacuum. A streetlight, for example, that would find it hard pressed to stand out in the daylight can assert its presence more immediately through the only voice it has. Lights reflecting off of cars and onto the fronts and sides of houses create a more apparent life than would be there when those same reflections are bleached into obscurity by the power of the sun. Even the sky has a character at night (to which its daylight counterpart pales in comparison) with thousands upon thousands of individual lights taking their place scattered among the uneven and grading values of the night sky. Its a silly old cliche, but the world really does come alive at night in a way.