She was born with an intense light on her inside, serene but curious, affable yet intense, who eagerly sought out the experiences of the world.
All too quickly, she realized that we all inhabit a fragile vehicle, easily filled with fear, trauma, worries, gradually removing the sparkle from the child’s eyes that she once was.
She grew up, changed, and thus faced the world wearing her new adult outfit, controlling the unpredictable impulses of contentment, suffocating any desire to release emotions.
And so a dark lens was born inside her eyes, distorting the world she observed, a world that quickly merged into herself, contaminating ideas, provoking sighs and outbursts. She had learned to be a specter of distorted survival, oblivious of her body and clinging at all costs to an incomplete idea of “soul”, frightened, constantly visited by imagined enemies.
Monsters do exist outside indeed, but the darkest ones always come from within. They take on grotesque forms that expose discomfort and spread fear, trying to annihilate our potential to be free.
During the night, in which everything is amplified to infinity, where part of the universe peeks out shimmering from the top, multiple frightening shapes might appear, but so does the strength of that visceral sensation that tells you: “life is just a fleeting breath”. And so in the night is born the unforgettable contrast between the fear of what we do not control, and the comfort of knowing that we are part of something so expansively infinite and perfect.
She finally took a deep breath on that special night and, aided by her small magical lamp, brought the light of the stars into her, projecting it confidently out of her. That brooding creature in front of her was not a menacing giant wolf, but just a beautiful ancient tree. And so in that night something different happened, she faced the monsters, broke the molds, lit up her forgotten paths and thus finally returned to herself, to home…
Background story: After spending a full week in May scouting locations for Milky Way Photography, during which I made my “Glimpse of Eternity” photo, me and Adriana tried to book the same exact hotel for the second round of night photography in June. To our dismay, the hotel owner was extremely unpleasant when we mentioned we wanted to return one more week, clearly because we were not the typical desired costumer, not having breakfast nor dinner on the premises, and arriving at 5am after a night photography session.
Covid had halted its activity quite a bit, and the Portuguese were keen on going on vacation in their own country, so there were almost no available hotels for that period. Fortunately, serendipity and fate brought us to a magical place called Xistos, a place we found by mere chance, outside of the usual search websites. It was supposed to just be a cosy place to sleep and then leave in search of new photo spots but we were surprised by an incredible gigantic property filled with the most incredible holm oak trees, with all sorts of shapes and patterns.
The place was so incredible that we ended up doing most of our week of shooting there, scouting the whole property both during the day and during the night to find the most interesting trees. This specific tree fascinated me as soon as I found it, as it looked like a giant wolf when viewed from a very specific angle. I knew I had to shoot it during the night and, even though it did not perfectly line up with the milky way as I would have liked, I got the creative help of Adriana and the cooperation of the property owner, who let us temporarily “steal” a candle lamp and create something different.
This shot is not a composite, and I blended a shorter exposure of Adriana with a long exposure of the tree with the night sky. The tree was illuminated with a warm led panel. Lots of trial and error on this one, with dozens of tries till it came out as we envisioned. To make it all even more exciting, there were dozens of wolf spiders on the ground, with her classic shiny eyes giving Adriana the shivers, but she was a brave warrior and confronted the “monster”!
All images are available for licensing, prints or NFTs. Contact me for more info.