Philosophy and Photography – Page 2 – The Rusty Ruin Journal

Local ruins and ruinous beliefs

April 29, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged abandoned, astronomy, culture, geology, Nikon, philosophy, psychology1 Comment

Some days it’s hard to ignore the culture wars that shoot back and forth viciously on digital threads or the hurried whispers of people who feel the uncomfortable cultural shift beneath their feet. I wonder whether we’re just living through especially tumultuous times or whether this has always been so? It has always been so, of course, because nature is change. Even the universe changes from moment to moment. It’s a truth some try to resist and others embrace. Often, we embrace it when young and ossify with age. That’s our nature too. Today’s passionate culture warriors become tomorrow’s slow-moving dinosaurs.

*A door used no more – Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm 1.8 lens*

I’ve always thought it unwise to commit too fully to a rigid set of beliefs. This is not to say belief systems are unreasonable or bad – humans seek meaning in all areas, and belief provides the framework for living in a universe that’s so vast as to cause us terror in dark and quiet moments – if you subscribe to Terror Management Theory. We cling to each other for warmth, just as we cling to belief like a security blanket.

We so often make the mistake of assuming our own beliefs are real and true and that they transcend time. Rather than understanding others deeply and cultivating compassion, we too easily find the beliefs of another person wrong, placing it on a rigid moral spectrum that functions as our own personal guide to undertsanding a seemingly random existence we seek desperately to understand, contain, and explain. In this way, we comfort ourselves.

If we believe the universe has a moral structure inherent, we also tend to find a moral structure in the world and find our beliefs aligning strongly with it. If we believe the universe is mechanistic and chaotic, without moral structure, we align our personal narratives to this view instead. We find that life’s purpose and meaning is tied inextricably to our most basic beliefs about reality. We may be trapped within them at the expense of understanding other people. Either we’re islands of meaning, separated by uncrossable gulfs, or human beings attached to each other by common bonds. Perhaps both.

*The tall church along the old road – Olympus E1*

You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, people sometimes say. For me, there is no right or wrong side, just people who have their own personal narratives, clinging to meaning. We’re all in the vast river of history together. It flows all around us. We’re part of the change happening from moment to moment, whether we embrace it or resist it. Neither approach is right or wrong – just ways of living and surviving and finding purpose and meaning.

I love geology and astronomy. I like the feeling of placing myself in the context of deep time – the kind of time that barely notices our existence because we’re fresh and new. In this way, I place human life in the context of more ancient things. Uluru, the famed monolithic red rocky heart of Australia, started to form 550 million years ago. It was here long before we were. It started to form when multicellular life dominated the planet, long before dinosaurs roamed. Imagine that?

When you look up at the stars, those photons hitting your retina have travelled for countless light years. They’ve struggled and twisted up through impossibly dense super-heated layers of distant suns – the forges of our universe – careened through the cold depths of deep space, entered your eye, hit your retina, and then been processed as a visual signal by your amazing mammalian brain. In this way, we’re all connected to the stars. I love that thought.

Camera settings, mistakes, and cognitive load

April 27, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged art, Contemplative Photography, Creativity, Nikon, Nikon D40, philosophy, Photography, psychology9 Comments

When I decided to dive headfirst into photography as a hobby, I was anxious about the technical jargon and understanding the myriad camera settings. The good news is that it wasn’t all that bad. I read and watched and learned a lot through trial and error.

Owning up to failure is always important. Being able to move on from a mistake to the next moment is even more important for continued growth in any field. I’ll tell you something, honestly: I still make plenty of mistakes!

*Falling down – Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm 1.8 DX lens*

Here are some of the most common photographic errors I continue to make:

Not resetting important camera settings: All too often, I’ve forgotten to change ISO when entering different light situations, or I’ve missed resetting exposure compensation.
The camera mis-pack: I’ve packed not enough when I needed extra gear and packed too much gear when I should have packed less.
SD card woes: Yes, I’ve filled up an SD card and forgotten to pack a backup. The only solution is to go through the recorded files and be brutal about deletion decisions.
ISO stubborn: Have you ever been stubborn about pushing your ISO in poor light situations? Base ISO is optimal for less digital noise in a photo, but a blurry photo just isn’t worth the stubborn refusal to UP the ISO a bit more to force a faster shutter speed! It’s better to have a noisy photo over a blurry one. Digital noise can be dealt with far more easily now using software tools. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve stubbornly refused to move from base ISO in fast-fading light, standing there with my arms tucked and not breathing just to cut as much movement as possible to achieve perfection at a too-slow shutter speed in hopes of a sharp image.
Reverse dialling: Older Nikon bodies dial positive and negative exposure compensation values in reverse to other cameras, so when my muscle memory becomes accustomed to the opposite dial movement of another camera, I find myself cursing the over or under-exposed photo on an old Nikon camera. At worst, I just forget the reverse dial motion completely until I’ve long moved on from the scene, at which point I sigh. Thankfully, the new Z-mount Nikons have changed both the exposure value dial direction and the reverse F-mount lens twist they had going for decades.

*The old green gate of J. Martin & Co. – Nikon D40*

I’ve been tough on myself in times past when it comes to making photographic mistakes. I think part of that was not feeling comfortable with the equipment and not believing I could learn enough to make good photos. In fairness, I still make plenty of stinky photos, but every poor photo teaches me something new, even if it’s a lesson I thought I’d already learned.

We can always improve our photography, but learning and living isn’t some easy linear path. It’s full of twists and turns and ups and downs. There are rocks of many different sizes littering the paths we walk. One of the hardest things to develop is self-compassion. We’re often kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves. But, why? We’re just as fragile and just as prone to mistakes as anyone else. All that truly matters is that we experience and inhabit the moment meaningfully, in whatever mode we choose: Auto, Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or Manual.

Wending my way through photo edits on a quiet day ~ curation, technical considerations, and personal growth

April 25, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Aesthetics and Technique, Creativity, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged art, Olympus, philosophy, PhotographyLeave a comment

It’s a public holiday and I’m working my way through old photos in hopes of finding some stray winners I’d forgotten about. I’ve always been my own biggest critic, editor, and curator. I think it’s good to develop our own tastes as photographers over time. It’s important to connect to our own photos without judgement, reflect on the image and the subject choice, consider the chosen settings, and remember our original photographic vision for the scene versus the actual image.

The key is to do this without judgement. Not every photo is going to meet your developing creative tastes. Not every photo is going to work at a technical level – some will be blurry, some will be rushed, some subject choices will seem odd, and some photos will seem dull. All this is absolutely OK. It needs to happen for growth to happen.

*Sundial on a cloudy day – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and Zenitar 16mm 2.8 Fisheye lens*

I love the way the sunlight hits the sundial to reveal the texture of the metal in the photo above. All of the rust spots, built-up debris, weathering, and patina is visually interesting. The old Zenitar Fisheye would be a specialist lens on a 35mm camera, but on the half-sized sensor of the Olympus it works out to an equivalent focal length of 32mm and functions as a nice wide lens with a sharp centre and mushy corners. In situations where I want to get close and get in as much of the scene as possible, it’s a great lens.

There’s a little blown out highlight right up the top, but blown highlights and blocked shadows are not necessarily bad things, and in the above photo it’s very small and not distracting. There are so many other elements that make up a photo! Consider these questions: is there any detail in the highlights/shadows that you want to preserve? Will preserving those details add to your photo? If you make a photograph and part of the image features a glowing light bulb, for example, should you decrease the exposure to bring down this highlight so that the filament inside the bulb can be seen? Will doing this compromise other elements in your photo? How integral are those highlights and shadows to your photographic vision? Instead of the sensor having to manage dynamic range that exceeds its capabilities, can you simply reframe the image instead to include less heavy highlights/shadows?

In the photo above, my decision to focus on the car door was made easy by the fact that the window at the top was allowing in a lot of light. The E1 has an old sensor that doesn’t manage high dynamic range so well, so it made sense for me to cut out most of the light from the window in my viewfinder composition so as to preserve the details in darker areas and on the car door. In effect, the old sensor didn’t need to work so hard to contain all of the dynamic range in the scene.

The red paint on the left, the curved red painted area to the bottom right, and the window at the top all serve to frame the weather-beaten door and its message. It may not be the most exciting photo in the world, but it works for me and it’s a good example of connecting a scene to a photographic vision through careful composition and technical knowledge. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always good at that and plenty of photos don’t meet my own tastes, but I keep learning.

Diesel, detritus and digital dust ~ a few more photos from the Nikon D70s

April 23, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Consumer Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Contemplative Photography, culture, Nikon, philosophy, psychology, Technology, Vintage digital2 Comments

How do you store your digital photo files? In this modern world, it’s a regular concern – how to safely and securely store all of the digital detritus that builds up around us. It used to be so easy when we just had to remember a few passwords. There was no such thing as 2 factor authentication years ago. Security breaches and cyber-hacks have put paid to having an easy life when it comes to digital security. And you know something? I’m a bit burned out on all of it…it feels a bit too much some days.

Just trying to organise photo files feels like a burden. I’ve had hard drives go bust over the years. The ever-swelling trove of files gets bigger and the voice gets louder: “Find an easy way to store all this crap or delete more!” – as if I’m stuck playing a simulation game and the goal is just to move shit around every minute of every day and night. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.

As I said previously, I use Microsoft One Drive these days. At the very least, I can use the cloud to quickly backup DNG files and TIFFs for future download. I know lots of people feel like they shouldn’t have to pay, but in the age of information overload, I think it’s a good idea to find a reasonable solution that offers enough storage for a good price. It’s the business model that Google tends to run with: offer generous freemium cloud storage, but not too much, so that people come to rely on it for their photo and file backups. Then offer paid tiers for more storage room.

I suppose we’re always looking to organise something – photos, files, music, our lives. And truthfully, sometimes all of those files feel like too much of a weight – like a digital albatross. I can’t even tell you how many sites I’ve been locked out of because an old paid email address went bust and now the site is sending the password I’ve forgotten to an email address that doesn’t exist. Or software license codes that got lost in the shuffle of hard drives and file moves. The 21st century has the feel of a password-protected version of copy of a copy of a copy, featuring tiny beige plastic parts that need to be glued together against a time-limit. So, I guess this is my rant about simplicity and complexity, as if there was ever a simple time. And since I work with vulnerable people, many of whom live really tough lives, I must say that I feel a little queasy even making a small complaint about any of it. Life moves and changes and we’re just the floating leaves flung by the ripples and waves as it goes.

A local photo walk with the Nikon D70S ~ rust, wood, and vegetation in the suburbs

April 22, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Gear Talk, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Contemplative Photography, Nikon, nikon d70, nikon d70s, philosophy, Photography, Vintage digital8 Comments

I’ve previously written about the Nikon D70. As I seem to have some affinity for older Nikon cameras, and as my D70 is also pretty beaten up, I couldn’t resist a good deal on a Nikon D70s with an attached Nikkor lens that has long been on my list: the Nikkor 35-70mm 3.3-4.5 AF lens. First released in 1986, the 35-70mm is most definitely a lens made for film cameras of the time as a cheap walk-around unit.

Some detractors say the focal length of 35-70mm isn’t especially useful on an APS-C sized sensor, but I disagree – 35mm is a popular wide, not not too wide, focal length, and 70mm can most certainly get you close or give you a decent portrait. Even if you consider equivalence (and a 50mm lens is still a 50mm lens on any sized sensor), the lens gives us 35mm eqivalent focal lengths of 52mm, 85mm, and 105mm – all three of them very useful lengths on any camera.

*Snapping plant monsters in the suburbs – Nikon D70s*

As for the D70s, it was announced in August 2005 and came hot on the heels of the original Nikon D70. The differences between the two models are minor, with the back-screen of the S iteration being 2 inches rather than the 1.8 inches of the original. The other features remain the same really: a 6.1 megapixel CCD APS-C-sized sensor, a top LCD screen with settings information, and an array of useful external controls, including ISO and White Balance, among others. Though it’s an all-black-plastic affair and has that familiar hollow feel of Nikon’s cheaper offerings, it definitely has a prosumer feature-set. Sure, the Nikon D200 is the professional upgrade, with a solid magnesium-alloy skeleton that feels like a giant warm buttered scone in the hand, but the D70s still remains a competent DSLR even in 2025.

All the photos were made using the lens at F-stops 5.6 – 8. As you can see, the photos are sharp and punchy, even using a 6.1 megapixel sensor from yesteryear. Need I go on about the competent image-making capabilities of these older cameras?

*Covered in cactus – Nikon D70s and Nikkor 35-70mm 3.3-4.5 lens*

I was helped by heavy cloud-cover, as there wasn’t a lot of dynamic range for the old CCD sensor to manage. Even though you can print pretty large from a 6 megapixel camera easily without much loss, the lack of cropping room makes one slow down and compose deliberately – there’s no running and gunning here. No lazy composition and fix it in the edit mentality. Old lenses, lack of high ISO, and fewer megapixels is good for getting back to the basics of photography: seeing clearly, connecting to the world through imagination, subject choice, composing deliberately, correct settings to suit scene and intent, and good hand-held technique.

If you print a 1 megapixel photo at billboard size, it will look like badly made bricks up close. If you stand 50 feet away instead, where just about everyone will be viewing it from, that 1 megapixel image will look pretty good. Viewing distance makes all the difference, and this is what we also need to consider when it comes to resolution and print sizes. Are you standing two inches away to view your photo prints? Even so, I don’t want to needlessly toss pixels away if I can help it, especially on these old cameras. I slow down, look, reflect, imagine, think through settings, check the histogram for exposure, and adjust if necessary.

A contemplative wander at sunrise with the camera

April 4, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Contemplative Photography, culture, Miksang, philosophy, Photography, psychology, Sony RX1008 Comments

I think contemplative photography has always appealed to me at some level. As photographers, we’re sometimes too focussed on making photos that announce our presence to others. That makes sense when looking at things through an economic or self-marketing lens. There’s a space for that, of course. But photography is about more than the next Like or Follow on the latest social media platform.

I’m not so interested in mass appeal, exposure, ego-stroking, or money. I’m certainly interested in people and ideas and connections, but the idea that I’d need to specialise and market and propel myself in front of others just feels wrong. It goes against my grain, I suppose. The foundation of my practice finds expression through wandering, seeing, imagining, and purpose in the moment. Seeing the world differently in a single moment is at the heart of photographic practice, for me.

It’s not always an easy thing to enter the mind-state of reacting instinctively to a scene. We so often judge what we see: is it a good photo? How can I make it better when editing it? How can I crop it? What camera settings should I use? When such thoughts take over, like a virus, they interrupt the flow of the moment and remove some of the joy. Is it truly important that we frame a scene so precisely that it attracts comments? Is it truly important that we even make the photo in the first place? Do we really need the camera to see the world?

On this last point: it’s true that we require no camera to experience the joy of the moment. And I think that as photographers, we’re prone to feeling as though we must capture everything and see the world through the lens. Still, the camera is integral to photography and there’s some consideration to be afforded technical settings. It’s the tension between the camera and inhabiting the world in the moment without distraction that can be the tricky tightrope for me to walk at times.

Tjoritja aglow ~ The West MacDonnell Ranges

March 31, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Alice Springs, Australia, Contemplative Photography, Nikon, Nikon Z5, outback Australia, philosophy, PhotographyLeave a comment

The West MacDonnell Ranges stretches west of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) for 161km. The area is known as Tjoritja to the local Arrernte people, and includes magnificent natural wonders like Ormiston Gorge, Standley Chasm, and The Ochre Pits. It’s a huge area that rewards exploration and requires more than a single day.

*West MacDonnell Ranges aglow 1 – Nikon Z5 and Nikkor 40mm F2 lens*

Upon driving back to Alice Springs after a long day on the road, the sun hit the ancient earth just right, and we pulled the car over to a patch of gravel. Like a long red serpent from The Dreamtime, stretching across the land, the rocky ridges were awash in the sun’s eventide glow. The photos here really don’t do it justice. How can one encapsulate over a thousand million years of geological history? It’s a land that feels as old as Time itself.

*West MacDonnell Ranges aglow 2 – Nikon Z5 and Nikkor 40mm F2 lens*

In a rush to exit the car, switch on the Nikon, and frame the scene before the light faded, I was amused by my scurrying about in the shadow of those ancient red rocky giants of earth. How many people had done the very same thing – catch the red glow of sunset across the hard-edged boulders, crags, and rocky outcrops? Many millions of sunsets across that land and there I was, one small thing in the vastness, fiddling with my camera, hoping to stop time.

In the forest of the night ~ the hostile internet

March 27, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Internet Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged AI, capitalism, cozy web, culture, internet, philosophy, psychology, social-media, Technology, world wide web2 Comments

Have you been involved in a flame-war online? Have you witnessed dog-piling on social media that causes crushing anxiety in the vulnerable? If so, maybe you’ve largely retreated to safer spaces online, cozier and more comfortable spaces, like direct messaging, where you feel like you have more control over your privacy and your online interactions. In these spaces of the cozy web, we distance ourselves from the bots, data scrapers, ads, web predators, profiteers, and shills of the corporatised web.

The Dark Forest

If aliens exist and life in the universe is abundant, why haven’t we made contact yet? The dark forest hypothesis presents one possible answer: the universe harbours plenty of alien life, but it remains hidden and silent for fear of making too much noise and attracting predators. I guess our radio broadcasts into the darkness of space are going to be a problem then!

Yancey Strickler applies the dark forest hypothesis to the internet ~ the top layer is inhabited by predators: data scrapers, bots, surveillance capitalism, marketers, shills, and growing generative AI. The cozier web lies beneath this layer and is where many of us hang out to get away from the internet of predators. You can drill down all the way until hitting the dark web. It’s a complex digital ecosystem.

*Reflections of a network – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

Into this dark forest, we introduce AI, where entire websites are being populated with AI generated content in the hopes that a few stray clicks will make some coin for faceless people somewhere. Error-filled news articles, health tips, wellness blogs, crypto ads and more are being churned out at a growing rate of digital knots ~ most of it designed to make money, gain followers, and inflate reputations. It’s trashy, low-quality, dull content, generated by AI LLMs and lazy and unimaginative human parasites. This is the anti-web – the web where AI talks to itself and we remain hidden in the forest.

Hyperlinks lost

Some months ago, I watched a video that was clearly advertising a wellness product. I didn’t think much about it until I looked closely at the woman in the ad and her movements – they were looped and repeated, her facial expressions betraying the stiff smile of generative AI. It was chilling really. The stuff of cyberpunk nightmares in a world where we don’t recognise each other, question reality, and where human interactions are mediated through digital networks shaped by personal profiles that AI has built to represent each of us so huge corporations can maintain their walled gardens, their power, and their profits.

It’s hard to remember now, but I know it wasn’t always like this. The idea that the internet could be a hostile dark forest seemed far from my mind in the 1990s. The hyperlink once connected intimate digital ecosystems together ~ humble links living on obscure web pages, pointing you in a hundred different directions and encouraging you to surf the web. It was almost aimless. There’d be evenings where I’d dial-up, connect, and then see where a search would take me: a personal page, a few broken thoughts from a person living on the other side of the world, a cool-links page, onwards to another page living in the digital corners, and ending up somewhere obscure and unexpected where I might learn about dolphin language experiments. It’s not altogether different from simply wandering about with a camera, without expectation or judgement.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

There was once a time when it seemed like the web could liberate entire nations and set information free. There was a promise in the medium – a thousand thousand thousand human thoughts and feelings connected by the humble blue hyperlink in a web browser. Instead, we have tech-billionaires who have constructed platforms and closed systems and called it the modern web – Web 2.0 or 3.0, or whatever the zeitgeist and marketing departments demand. In their systems, hyperlinks are nothing more than restricted sections in a social media Bio – a way to funnel the gullible, the vulnerable, and the young to AI-written websites and empty blogs where generating income from clicks is all that matters. The click of the humble hyperlink has been twisted into a way to service the predatory machine in the dark forest. We’re sedentary now, having forgotten how to walk aimlessly, and doomscrolling our days away.

*Tranquil moments – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

Have I become a Nikon fan, unwittingly?

March 18, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Aesthetics and Technique, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged camera, culture, digital camera, Nikon, Nikon D40, Nikon D5100, nikon d70, Nikon Z5, Photography, psychology16 Comments

When I look in the cupboard, I see lots of cameras and lenses – some would say, rather too many! Plenty of my film cameras are still piled up in boxes, so they barely add to the shelved pile. Poring over my digital cameras and lenses specifically, I see a growing number of Nikon branded things. I wonder if I’ve become brand loyal? I’d certainly not describe myself as a person overly concerned with brands!

Identifying with brands

There are lots of people who adore certain brands. By identifying with a brand, we express something of who we are. We recognise some characteristics in the brand that strike a chord within us. We announce to the world: “This brand expresses who I am or who I want to be!”. Perhaps the brand expresses qualities we aspire to demonstrate in our own lives? Perhaps it reinforces a self-perception that we’d like others to notice? Brands are symbols that can be important to our identities, and the most successful brands resonante more strongly with larger numbers of people.

You could say that brand Nikon is doing something right after being so long in operation. The Nikon Corporation has been around since 1917 and has become a household name in that time. They know how to make great cameras, but that’s not to say that Canon or Sony don’t also make great cameras. They certainly do! And they have their own branding and marketing. Truthfully, I’ve often felt that Nikon have been pretty terrible at marketing their gear. It’s great engineering, but companies like Canon and Sony often seem to have had more attractive marketing campaigns over the years.

So, I guess I’m wondering why I open up my cupboard and see a growing bunch of Nikon cameras staring back at me – what does it say about me? Am I now a brand fan?

How I got started

The truth is that I never thought I’d be much good with a big pro-looking camera. I was convinced that small and simple cameras would be my fate, seeming to fit better with my self-perception of not being very technically minded.

Despite this, I decided some years ago to push my limits, so I purchased a Nikon D5100 in hopes of finding a way to express myself more creatively. It was either the Nikon or the equivalent Canon, but the D5100 just seemed to have some better tech-stuff inside – a marginally bigger APSC sensor, a well-regarded sensor also featured in the D7000, and the fact that I could use so many F Mount lenses. For about the same price as the Canon, it seemed to be a slightly better camera.

*Waiting after a tiring day – Nikon D5100 with Nikkor 55-200mm DX*

I wasn’t at all disappointed with the D5100. On the day I received it, I set about educating myself on how to use a DSLR. I’ll be honest – it was a bit intimidating. It was a very different and more complex camera than I was used to. After reading a lot and watching a lot of how-to and exposure triangle videos, I went out and did some night photography. I can highly recommend this practice if you want to learn about the importance of light in photography. You very quickly learn that light is everything when you’re running around at night with a cheap tripod and a shutter remote that only works half of the time!

For the Nikonians and other interested parties

I don’t have the D5100 anymore, but I do have a growing bunch of Nikons that many Nikonians would be familiar with:

Nikon D40 – It’s an old and small DSLR from Nikon, featuring a 6.1 megapixel CCD sensor. I’ve written more about it here. Paired with Nikon’s older kit kens – the Nikkor 18-55mm – it’s a great lightweight camera.
Nikon D70 – My copy is a bit on the used side, but it still makes great photos with the CCD sensor. Some say it has a definite cool bias, but that can be perfect for many types of scenes.
Nikon D7100 – This was my workhorse Nikon DSLR for a long time. I upgraded to it at a good price after selling the D5100 and what a difference it felt like upon opening the box! Unlike the D5100, it has more external controls and solid ergonomics that don’t feel plastic. It feels like a professional camera when contrasted to the D5100 !
Nikon Z5 – After a long time, Nikon finally entered the mirrorless game. The Z5 is every bit a modern mirrorless camera for a good price, considering the 35mm digital sensor. After using my mirrorless Olympus OMD EM5 cameras for so long, this feels both familiar and a huge upgrade in capability. As much as I trust my D7100, the Z5 is my new workhorse.
Nikon D200 – Released in 2005, the D200 features a well-regarded Sony-made CCD digital sensor. I regard it as one of the best early DSLRs from Nikon, as the camera market was shifting from film to digital.

I know that my Nikons aren’t exactly heavy enough to bow the shelving. It just feels like they outnumber my other cameras by a long way! Maybe it’s because I use them a lot, so I feel like I’m a brand loyal Nikonian? I’ve used my share of small junk cameras over the years, so it’s nice to pick up a big-name camera that just works when I want it to. I’ve had a few cameras die on me now – I’m looking at you, Sigma DP1 and Sigma DP2M ! I still don’t think I’m a brand loyalist, but I do like my Nikons.

The Night Feeling ~ wondering and wandering in the quiet night

March 15, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Contemplative Photography, culture, health, mental-health, mindfulness, night photography, philosophy, Photography, psychology4 Comments

When the noise and dust of the day settles into quiet night, the mind turns inward. No longer are we distracted by the daily scramble. Night heralds a time when we have the opportunity to reflect on our day and ourselves.

A solitary light bulb glows dimly behind the window of a closed shop on a quiet street; leaves are rustled by a warm zephyr along a familiar laneway as distant stars shine above; during a long drive at night alone, the music on the radio synchronises perfectly with your thoughts and the world gliding by outside. Have you experienced similar scenes and feelings of melancholy, peace, serenity, deep thought, and reflection? If so, you’re likely familiar with The Night Feeling.

What’s The Night Feeling?

I came across a Reddit group called The Night Feeling last year. It’s dedicated to photos that encapsulate those kinds of scenes and feelings. I’d never heard it called that before, but I’ve certainly had those emotions and thoughts, especially at night. I even remember discussing this with a friend many years ago in relation to the sorts of emotions we’d sometimes experience when driving long distances alone late at night, with just the right piece of music playing in the background.

We’re usually so busy and distracted during the day that we forget how we’re feeling and who we truly are when we’re not serving others, doing our jobs, shopping, socialising, and so on. Being busy can help us endure tough times but we often forget to self-reflect and get in touch with who we are without the distraction and noise. When everything is quiet and night falls, we have an opportunity for self-reflection and thought. And there are certainly links between night and strong emotions and darker mental states. In the Mind After Midnight Hypothesis, for example, the hours between midnight and early morning are associated with disinhibition, risky behaviour, darker emotional states, poor judgement, and depression.

When the world is quiet

I associate certain kinds of scenes with the sort of calm, observational, slightly melancholic self-reflection that falls under the umbrella of The Night Feeling – walking through light rain on deserted streets that are usually busy; city lights reflected in water at night; a warm wind blowing through trees as I walk through a quiet part of town; an old machine lit up and no-one around. It’s as though the elements of nature announce themselves softly, emerging briefly through the haze of our urban environments to remind us that we need closer contact with our origins.

As nature reminds me that it’s bigger than any human-made urban environment and any trouble of my own, I feel that momentary sense of peace and calm ~ the moment that my own problems melt into the vast scale of the world and the stars beyond. In this expanded state of awareness, the small worries and quotidian tasks of daylight hours retreat and true self-reflection can occur, as one’s inner world becomes infinitely larger and more clearly focussed.