Heard Them Stirring: Music Mosaic

Heard Them Stirring - Fleet Foxes

When setting out to complete this assignment, I decided to take heed from “Seeing” and use the camera to see something in a new light. I figured the best way to do this, while also finding a way to take photographs that compliment Fleet Foxes “Heard Them Stirring,” was to take long exposure shots from the foothills trails not far from my apartment. By taking pictures with the shutter open for as long as 30 seconds, I could see so much more of the mountains due to the amount of light captured by the camera. Instead of seeing dark and shady silhouettes against the night sky, my photographs captured the mountains with the glowing light from Provo. Even in the far distance, light from Salt Lake City silhouetted the Timpanogos mountains. It was really surprising to see how much light was captured that I couldn’t see with the naked eye.

Post-processing was also important to help the photographs better capture the surreal feeling I was looking for. I took a nod from a long-exposure photographer I follow on Adobe’s Create blog, Toby Harriman, who commented that “Cameras don't see what our eyes see. When people ask if they can get copies of pictures, I say, "Not until I process them." I'm a post-processor all the way. My shots are not done until I run them through Photoshop Lightroom 5. I live out of it. I'll apply basic edits just to see how I like them. I'm always tweaking stuff. I try to keep a lot of it as natural as I can.” So, to improve my photo’s I experimented with Lightroom 5, and was really pleased with how my photographs came out. Part of the success here was also due to shooting in RAW instead of allowing the camera to process the photos into JPEGS, as doing so gave me a ton more data to work with in post-processing.

I was also happy with how the photos captured the same mysterious and somewhat eerie sound of “Head Them Stirring.” Something about that song strikes me as mysterious, and I felt that by taking long exposure shots of the mountains and the city at night I could compliment that feeling created by the song. I also tried to juxtapose industry with nature – the two can be seen as complimentary in the photos, as the light from the city illuminates the mountain, and the power cables compliment the composition of the photographs. For some reason, I felt that doing expounded upon the Americana sound of “Heard Them Stirring” – my photos of natural elements that interacted with technology in a way that I think is unique to the western United States, which I find this song to be reminiscent of. The song evokes imagery of wilderness and nighttime, and being able to capture the same feeling with photography is something I find to be a special opportunity for one living in Provo. Back home in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, different landscapes would either be very natural or very industrial, and rarely would the two come together like they do in Utah.