that .wretched shadow (pt. i)

Do you know that feeling (photographers) when you pass a scene and you envision a great picture, but you don’t have your gear with you?
It’s happened to me a fair couple of times. This image *dramatic voice* has been the ball on the chain of my existence.

What it was supposed to be

I remember the first time I passed this place. It’s a warehouse not far from where I live. It was a bright, sunny, late autumn afternoon, and I was coming home from work. The sun was low in the sky, and it cast an incredibly long, perfectly sharp shadow on the side of the building. Nearly all that negative space in the photograph was covered with the shadow of those stairs. It looked fantastic.
I said a bunch of really bad words for not having my gear with me, and knew it the sun was too low already to be still there casting that shadow by the time I returned with my gear.

The next 3-4 months I drove by there I had my gear in the car, yet every time there was something preventing me from getting that image I had seen that one late afternoon.
It was overcast.
Raining cats and dogs.
I was too late.
Too early.
The shadow was fuzzy, the shadow wasn’t long enough…
And so on, and so forth.

During that entire period, only three or four times I saw a potential opportunity. Then, however, the parking lot was full of containers, trailers, pallets stacked high, obscuring the full wall and the full shadow.

The compromise

Winter came and passed. The position of the sun changed, and it dawned on me that I would have to wait until next autumn for another chance.
This was 2019. It is now 2025.

The photograph you see here is shot in January 2021. It’s the closest I’ve come to shooting what I saw that first time I passed there in 2019. I think it’s still a cool picture, but the shadows are not even remotely as long as what I saw then.
I do love the negative space in the photograph, though. It’s very Truman Show-ish.

The world’s still spinning, the sun’s still shining (every so often)…, and I kept on hoping. And so we rolled into 2025. I was the end of March.
I passed the scene, again.
The sun was out, again.
There was a shadow, better then I’d seen in quite some time. Can I add here “again”, again?
I didn’t have my photography gear with me, again.
And, you guessed it: there was crap piled up behind the fence, again.
I did have my phone with me now, though, so I did pull over and had a go with it.

You can see in the quality of the image that it’s not what it could’ve been, had I had my big camera with me.
But I reckon after so many year of passing by there, waiting, hoping, anticipating… It’s better than nothing.

And as I mentioned before: the sun’s still shining, the world’s still turning… who knows what happens in the years to come?