Jeremy Green “Happy Trails” 05/12/16

Cameras were so much simpler in the film era. They were mechanical instruments that exposed photographic film, and that’s about it. Modern day digital camera equipment is so much more capable for the most part, allowing me to make images that were not possible before.

This photograph was made with a Nikon F3 film camera and Kodachrome film. I mounted the camera on a tripod, opened the shutter on “B” for bulb, crawled into my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. I planned to wake up a couple of hours later to close the shutter, thus producing a time exposure of the stars’ apparent movement across the black sky framed by the dark rocky walls of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend, Texas on the Rio Grande. But I overslept, waking as the dawn’s early light was starting to hit the canyon and light the sky. I quickly closed the shutter for what I thought would be a failed image. I thought the sunlit sky would burn out the star trails that had slowly been recorded while I slept. One single frame on a roll of 36 that would not be seen until some time later when the film came back from a Kodak lab where it was developed.

There are happy accidents that sometimes happen when I make a picture and things don’t go as planned. The picture has the element of color that I failed to plan for. The sky is deep blue, not black, the canyon walls are partially lit by the early daylight, and the stars have color that I did not discern. Occasionally the unplanned picture surpasses my best efforts, lending a little bit of magic to the process of photography.