Mining of Art

In a previous post, I was talking about why I don't delete any photos on camera anymore. I recently came across a series of three excellent articles at "The Online Photographer" that give even better reasons, such as avoiding data loss on compact flash memory cards. See To Delete or Not, That Is the Question (Carl Weese); To Delete or Not: Computer Expert (Dave New); and To Delete or Not: Photojournalist (Josh Hawkins)

Here is a photo that I took last summer in Santa Fe. I was playing around with long exposures in pitch dark night. They all came out pretty horrible looking on the preview screen, and I was going to delete them all, but something checked my impulse, and I kept a few of them (now I'd keep them all). With a bit of cropping and rotating, I was able to rescue the interesting part of this one. Notice how the bottoms of the clouds are at a 45-degree angle. Clouds don't slope that way in real life. Anyway, this looks like it was taken in broad daylight, or with a very powerful flash. But it wasn't. It was literally pitch dark out there. But there was enough light, barely imperceptible to the human eye (I had to use a flashlight to set the controls on my camera), that after keeping the shutter open for 10 seconds, there was enough of it to make an image. Pretty cool, eh? Not that this is National Geographic submission quality or anything, but it's not a throw-away either.