The cactus garden pictures were the first I took for this project. I chose the night after a full moon to maximize natural light, baked food for the occasion, and invited several friends.

I used a 1950's Zeiss medium format camera with black and white film on a tripod with a shutter release cable. There was too little light for a light meter reading, so I guessed at exposure times, bracketing between 5 and 20 minute exposures. It was an interesting experience. Never before had I taken pictures with so little idea of how they would turn out. Normally, when you take a picture, it seems simple. Your camera either chooses your exposure for you or tells you what settings to choose to make your picture look right. In this kind of photography, you take the picture with a sense that it will look a particular way when it is developed. (In reality, it is not that simple; there is a complex calculation behind that exposure setting, and the pictures still can surprise you.) But not only did I not know how long to leave the shutter open, but I could barely see out of the camera's rangefinder, so I did not even know what would be included in my picture or whether it was in focus. I just had to take my best guess, press the shutter release, and wait.

I think the difficulties I experienced with the technical aspects of this project - from exposure to focusing - highlight the ways in which we construct every photo we take. Aesthetic / technical standards such as the zone system are approaches we have developed to create fixed images in accordance with our perception of how things look. But in situations like this one, those systems break down. For instance, what does it mean to create an image with balanced light and dark tones when the subject itself is a dark night? Is that still an appropriate goal?

The first two photos here are of the picnic itself. The people are vague blurs. It's hard to figure out what is going on in them, especially the second. I have no idea what that bizarre, cylindrical shape in the second picture is. Could that be one of the people? These pictures show how different time scales affect the way we perceive the event.

I took the third after the picnicers had left, for a contrast. I also thought the contrast between natural and artifical light in the cactus garden was fascinating. In one sense, it is probably one of the darkest places on campus at night, because there are no streetlights. The cactus garden is a space that has been designated as a space apart, and it is encircled by trees to separate it visually from the main flow of campus. But at night, you can see the campus lights in the distance: there is a parking lot to one side, and cars pass by on Palm Drive on the other. At night the passing headlights are small spots of light on the periphery. This photo was probably the best exposed, because I included those peripheral lights.