Early Morning Meditations

Early Morning Meditations - Part 3

Third in a series of trips to New Boston with the camera to catch barges, stars and bugs.

Today is a series of photographs of a barge coming toward me while I have tripod and camera planted on the floating boat dock. The time is 4:30 in the morning. The real objective to these pics is to continue to experiment with low-light moving objects.

Searchlights spread across the water like low-flying angel wings. The speed is deceptive: it seems like it takes forever to get where you are, but then you discover that in no time it is gone.

And as this barge passes by quickly it continues to scan the shore and its front end. Soon it would be able to turn those lights off as the sun comes up. But it is a halting trip down the river. It takes 2 1/2 hours to pass through a lock and there are 29 of them above St. Louis.

What I would do when this boat passed would be to hop in the truck and head toward Keithsburg, get set up again and retake it as it passes. Crazy? Maybe, but the combination of dark, quiet solitude of nature and then the quiet approach of lights on a watery highway fills the senses. Try it.

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