testmeat photoblog

i stayed in a yurt camp when i was in tulparkul in kyrgyzstan, where they only ran the generator for electricity at specific times in the day. as such i was confident there wouldn't be any light pollution at night time, and therefore i was hopeful it would be a clear night so the stars would shine bright. the camp was about 100 metres from a big lake, of which there were many dotted around the landscape, so in my mind i crafted a perfect image of reflected stars bouncing off the still water. i set my alarm after the power shut off, and woke up a few hours later to try and capture this image, walking in the dark to the edge of the lake. i think it was quite early on when i realised that it wasn't going to plan, as i could see the wind was shifting the water in the lake and therefore blurring out the star reflection. it was also a pretty terrifying experience, as i kept hearing weird nosies at unknown proximity in the pitch black. i was pretty confident it was the sound of cows, who were certainly present on that land during the day time, but that didn't make it any less scary. despite the fear, and the increasingly futile attempt at what i was trying to capture, i still spent the best part of an hour with the camera pointed towards the lake. i eventually called it, and was about to leave with the tiniest hope that i could recover something from the shots, when i turned around. in all that time i hadn't realised that the most beautiful spectacle was literally behind my back. i could have saved so much time and undue worry if i had opened my eyes a little wider and looked around, but i feel like the experience makes this photo that much more earned. it also acts as another great reminder that an image you're imagining in your head is no match for an image you never considered imagining in real life.

here's the original