Four Minutes of Light

21 July 2026

I got to the water later than I meant to (about 8pm), which turned out to be the only reason the shot worked. The far bank had gone completely flat.

Dusk over the Delaware — Shot wide open at `f/1.4`.

Why late is better

The window is shorter than you think. A few things I keep forgetting, and then rediscovering every summer:

Meter for the sky, not the water. The water will sort itself out.
Shoot wider than feels right. You can crop; you cannot uncrop.
Stay ten minutes after you think it is over. It usually is not.

The boring technical part

I keep a script around that renames everything by capture time before it goes anywhere near the gallery. Nothing clever:

#!/bin/sh
# rename by capture time (note the unbalanced paren -- inert in here
for f in *.JPG; do
    d=$(exiftool -d '%Y%m%d-%H%M%S' -DateTimeOriginal -S -s "$f")
    mv "$f" "$d.jpg"
done

That is it. It has survived three laptops and one (Very Bad) backup incident, which is more than I can say for the photos it was renaming.

You can escape a paren like this ( or a backslash like this \ when prose really needs one.

The rest of that evening is up there. See the archive for the others.