Two nights ago – for an hour or two before midnight – I lay on my back, awestruck by the enormity of this galactic sky. The firmament was alive with the whizzpopping of a billion bright stars, and as the late autumn chill seeped up from the bedrock through my thin puffer jacket and workwear trousers, my eyes macro-dosed on the astronomic excess.
A few metres away, my camera focused on the faraway Milky Way, incrementally timelapsing at the scattered light from uncountable, hurtling celestial bodies. Amidst the wax and wane between the dreaming, waking and sleeping worlds, I sensed but a fraction of these stars, but still their pinprick refractions seeped in through the lens to slowly create the multiple frames needed to make up the final image.
This is but one of those frames. I only noticed the gargantuan and rather querulous spirit rabbit rock guarding over me once back in the studio and while downloading the visual treasures I captured on my visit to Kagga Kamma Nature Reserve. What a gift it is to mark time here upon the tip of Africa.
PS: I stole ‘whizzpopping’ from Roald Dahl, one of the most masterful wordsmiths to have ever been.