Alien Spacecraft Discovered by the Railroad Tracks that Run Through Downtown.

 I often post images and forget to come back and caption them. I guess I'm either too lazy for this kind of presentation (blogging) or I wrongly assume that everyone thinks as I do and you immediately understand what I was looking at when I took a photograph. 

Take this image for instance. If one were acquainted with trains and train trafficking they might recognize this as some sort of device having to do with routing trains so they don't collide with each other on the same track. Kind of makes sense...I guess. I find it odd that the silver, metallic device just sits in the middle of some scrubby grass next to a largely unused parking lot near the middle of Austin. I can't imagine why it needs the rocketship nosecone apparatus at the top. I look at the bottom and see the device supported by four legs which keep it about a foot off the ground. I am further mystified as there is no writing, no labels and no logo on the device that might speak to its provenance or aim us toward its owners. It is, to me, an enigma. A mystery. 

When I look at it while walking with a camera I respond to the bright silver finish and the odd rocket-esque device on the top and I stop trying to figure out what it's actually use is. Why it was made and placed in a little plot of almost indestructible, native Texas grass. I'm sure I could do a search online and find its exact reason for existing but as I may have mentioned before, I am quite lazy. 

Instead, when I look at stuff like this I tend to regress to a time in my life when I spent most Summer days lounging around the house (after swim practice, of course!), soaking up the air conditioning in my parent's house, and reading science fiction books. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and scores of others. Reading about robots gone awry on the surface of the planet Mercury, lonely astronauts adrift and powerless in the depths of space, hard-headed experts working out the faux science of hyper-space travel. Robots grappling with the idea of self while still hewing to the three laws of robotics. And then there is the ancient law that says those who can't enjoy an occasional science fiction novel are doomed to be boring...and fatuous. 

And when I regress to that state of mind everything looks like an alien object put here for a reason we don't yet know. Like the Monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey". And so I photograph the found object in order to catalog the presence of alien life all around us. Relics from the cosmos...

When I look at the image above I think perhaps that the top part, the rocket ship shaped, torpedo inflected appurtenance might be the actual space craft of a tiny species of highly advanced beings from another universe. Like the people who lived in the bus station locker in the movie, "Men in Black." 

Then I notice another clustered unit just to the right and about forty feet back from the "mother ship" and I wonder what the relationship is between the two objects. And I wonder if it would be scary to see these things at night, hiding from the liquid glow of a greenish-yellow streetlight. Would they be more interesting photographed in color after the sun sinks over to the west towards Fredericksburg and then hides just past Marfa? Would the colors of the urban space reflect off the shiny surfaces in a peculiar way? Would it seem odd to people passing by to see an old, grizzled photographer setting up a last century tripod in order to capture something special about something very mundane and casual? Would they call the police? Would they just shake their heads and remember something about eccentricity and aging? 

I walk around the device several times and let my subconscious decide the angle from which I'll take the final photograph. I'm using a small camera with a wide angle lens. I used to photograph things like this with a longer lens but when I started celebrating the idea of object strangeness I started to see the perceived distortion of the wider lenses as being a partner in my art/science fiction/documentation. And I found I liked it. 

I chose to shoot in black and white because, in color, the image was boring. How do I know? Well, I tried shooting it in color and....nothing. Contrasty black and white? Much nicer. Now if I could only come up with a short, concise caption that would sum up what I was feeling and how I interpreted what I was looking at I'll be set and ready to share. 

Just a thought about an image. It's important that, if you want to have fun while photographing, you have the mindset to make things fun. And sometimes that means interpreting the things you see around you in a different and sometimes sillier way.