Night Photography by David Baldwin

Inspirations

"Your night photography is beautiful, especially love Windy Night and the Lady Chapel at Wells. I am a lover of night photography, mainly discovered via the internet and yours is special. Carry on!"

~

Susan Hill, Author of "The Woman in Black"

"While Brassai and Schwab use electric sources to light their images, British photographer David Baldwin uses the limited light available from the night sky to illuminate his images. He finds this light using long exposure times, and by escaping the light pollution of the city to focus on nature in the English countryside."

~

Weburbanist, "10 Unusually Talented Night Photographers: The History and Art of Night Photography"

At Night

Sunk deep in the night
I sink in the night
Standing alone underneath the sky
I feel the chill of ice
On my face
I watch the hours go by

The hours go by ....

You sleep
Sleep in a safe bed
Curled and protected
Protected from sight
Under a safe roof
Deep in your house
Unaware of the changes at night

~

Lyrics: Robert Smith

Lumber (excerpt)

"Full moon, the hills are flying
Orion like a kite,
I feel the tug of silver"

~

Isobel Thrilling from "Chemistry of Angels"

"The stars are really as much a part of us as our beautiful rolling countryside, our mountains, rivers, and cities. We take pictures of all these, so why not take pictures of the stars?"

~

R. Newton Mayall & Margaret W. Mayall from
"Skyshooting - Photography for Amateur Astronomers"

The Sleeper (excerpt)

"At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim
Exhales from out her golden rim"

~

Edgar Alan Poe

"Though my soul may set in darkness
It will rise in perfect light,
I have loved the stars too fondly
To be fearful of the night".

~

Sarah Williams from "The Old Astronomer to his Pupil"

"O how healthy, how pleasant, and how sweet it is to sit in solitude, to be silent and to talk with God!"

~

Thomas a Kempis

"I felt like I was at the end of a thin cord that could be cut at any time. It was precarious but yet I felt comfortable. I felt something other than what we can visually sense"

~

Jim Irwin (Lunar Module Pilot Apollo 15)

"What are you looking at? What are you looking through? You can call it the universe, but it's the infinity of space and the infinity of time"

~

Eugene Cernan (Commander Apollo 17)

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world"

~

Oscar Wilde

"We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time"

~

T S Eliot

"For now we see through a glass, darkly"

~

1 Corinthians, xiii, 12

"For many commentators ... the condition of simultaneously being of the past and appearing in the present - defines the photograph as a melancholic form ... "

~

Steve Edwards, from "Photography, A Very Short Introduction" Oxford University Press 2006

"Palmer had not yet turned four at the time and had still been living in Surrey Square where, tucked up in bed on a winter night, he remembered lying wakefully, watching the moon rising through the bare elm branches, floating away into a deep violet dusk. Its silvery light flooded into his room. Palmer gazed at the shadows that were cast by the trees, at their shapes fiddling and tangling upon painted walls ...

... Shadows for him accrued a soulful new resonance from then on, conjuring not just an awareness of life's fragile mysteries but also a wistful yearning for a greater reality beyond."

~

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, from "Mysterious Wisdom - The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer" Bloomsbury 2011

"What struck (Alan Bean) when he returned from Deep Space was the movement and change all around us here, where in space you just have "a sunny day then a sunny night then a sunny day then a sunny night". He remembers going to the shopping centre two or three times after splashdown and just sitting there eating an ice cream cone and watching the people go by, as thrilled and fascinated by this sight as by anything he'd seen on the surreal adventure."

~

Andrew Smith, from "Moondust - In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth" Bloomsbury 2005

"More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold
the Eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us".

~

Novalis from "Hymns to the Night"

Three quotations from James Attlee

"If you sit in a garden as dusk falls you will notice the colour leaching out of the flowers; the eye's sensitivity to greens and blues is enhanced while its sensitivity to red decreases, a reversal of daylight vision knows as the Purkinje shift. Just as in a black and white photograph, the lack of colour visible by moonlight makes the architectural structure of the landscape more apparent."

"(Thoreau) brought his keen eye to bear on the visual appearance of the nocturnal world in his essay 'Night and Moonlight'.

The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky ... All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hillside. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on.

As light fades in the New England woods, Thoreau's eyes switch from photopic (cone) to scotopic (rod) vision. White and silver features assume a new importance by moonlight as he loses the ability to discern colours in his surroundings."

"My search for moonlight has taken me across the world and out into my own back garden"

~

James Attlee, from "Nocturne - A Journey in Search of Moonlight" Penguin Books 2012