Challenge in pollution p2
Make sure to read part 1 to have more context.
Before I continue with that day’s tale I have to give you three elements that will help clarify the rest of this post. One is that that very day, in the morning, I went to the gym. I’m not a big weightlifter at all but you can imagine how tired my body was when I got to the end of the afternoon. Then, I only had a roll of Kimbab at noon after the gym, that I devoured as quickly as my jaw allowed me, and, due to the excitement of going to a new place and challenging myself, I totally forgot to bring any food! Only water...
The last relevant info is that the ridge I was on isn’t a long one at all but it is quite steep. And I walked it up and down about 6 times in the course of my frenetic explorations! Needless to say that when you add all those factors I was growing stupidly tired, but because of the mental space I was in I didn’t really feel it... until...
I didn’t see it directly, I had to look at this shot at the back of my camera to realize how pink/red the rocks were! I even thought I had set my white balance wrongly…
You can easily see how the picture above has a pink tint to it. That is no trickery of mine at all: the sun had set and it was time for that vivid pink light, last colorful omen of night. What had happened is that, in my fury for compositions I had totally lost track of time. That focus high I was experiencing showed its other side of the coin: loss of peripheral awareness. If you have heard of how hunting decuples your senses, well it was that, just in the opposite direction.
I had to quickly check if the sky was worth it: it was.
So another storm took me: “take your tripod, collapse it in half, no time to put your camera in the bag, shoulder your bag and run to the top, to that lazy tree you saw earlier.”
And I ran.
I ran a good chunk of the way up, about 1 minute away from my goal.
And I stopped running. My body said: STOP! As if a truck had crashed into me, my body made me feel all the tiredness from the rest of the day at that very second.
I took a knee. Not much else I could do. Lactic acid had built in my thighs, rather, my thighs consisted of searing lactic acid.
I looked up at the sky through the trees, it was still vibrant pink, I had some time, 10 minutes maybe. And my destination wasn’t far, I could see its outline through the foliage. But my brain was fogging from the effort.
When a drop of sweat crawled into my right eyeball, and the stinging salt shook me back to my senses, jump started my spirits and with a rather pathetic grunt, I’ll admit, I stood up and put a step in front of the other.
Nothing remotely close to a fantasy hero hit to the ground but standing back up again to lead a last charge, of course, but it surely felt like it inside!
And finally, after probably no more than 2 minutes that felt like an eternity of pain, wrecked and covered in sweat, with eyes blurry and filled with stars I arrived at the tree I hoped would make a nice composition.
And that’s when focus mode kicked back in.
Quite pink! Framing was really hard to include all the pieces together. But I’m happy about this result.
The sky was a dream pink, unexpected for such a polluted day. It wasn’t the perfect sky but it was excellent. And signs were showing that it wouldn’t last much longer, so I let my body kick into auto mode and I searched for an interesting framing.
I had a tree and a pink sky, but the way the tree is basically horizontal makes it really hard to display it interestingly. I found a long root on the ground perpendicular to it and I instantly decided to use it as foreground interest. But then the horizon split the tree in half so I had to invert my tripod’s center column to turn my camera upside down and set it millimetres off the rocks. First time I ever had to use that feature of my tripod!
I usually prefer portrait orientation but I like how this time a horizontal composition shows a lot more context and how cracks in the rock floor lead to the tree.
The sky stayed bright pink for no more than 5 minutes total so I had to rush every action, every decision. Exhaustion was still there in the background, standing by to kick in as soon as I would release tension. But it was boiling nonetheless, and so I spent those 5 minutes grunting at every move, without actually being conscious of any sound coming out of me. I might have frightened the couple of hikers who were walking down because they looked at me weird!
Finally sky interest died, I stopped and all went quiet.
This is the last shot that had a tiny bit of pink left in the sky. I chose this framing because of the waves the rocks make, they mirror the shape of the tree.
I thought I was going to collapse and lie down for a bit but I just stood there. Body stiff, mind absent, eyes lost in the distance, thoughts stalled. I don’t remember if wind blew in my ear or if I scanned the view over city and mountain. It probably did. I probably did. Don’t know. I just stayed there. I just was there. Not sure for how long. My body was buffering all that had happened in the last 10 minutes, like a staircase mind finds a come back after the event, my body took in the effort and started the evaluation now.
Slowly, thoughts resumed. Then I felt all my muscles coming back online. Before long I had rebooted, it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed. I moved about to check myself, balance was the only slight issue left. The brand new boots didn’t help, they were still a little too cushiony but my hips would compensate.
It felt like a mission accomplished.
A thick slice of life that will linger a little longer but still, you know you’ll move on, even though it will take you several days to recover.
Peace was back.
And night fell over the mountain and the city. Peace and pollution.
However, it wasn’t entirely over. I walked down again to my first rocks to take advantage of the blue hour and happily found that the temple’s Buddha is lit at night. So I will leave you with these few images from that hour.
It wasn’t fully dark yet but the temple lights simply give the place a different dimension.
Night had almost completely fallen now, but pollution essentially works as a huge city light reflector so it wasn’t exactly dark.
Interestingly this framing works better at night than during the day. I like how the lit Buddha statue dominate the composition. It just makes the whole image more powerful.
I went back to my daytime spot to capture a day - night comparison shot. And I have to say I prefer this one, it’s just more dramatic and I always love blue anyway!
Bonus picture from inside the temple. You can see how the statue towers over the rest of the temple, a bit like a guardian angel. Now it’s high time to close this challenge and head to my air filtered home!
As always thank you very much for having read this far, I hope you enjoyed this rather epic ending. I will be coming back to this area for the next post, with much more interesting weather conditions. I hope this double story and the coming one will give you the will to go visit Samseongsan, it is a beautiful mountain.
A bientôt!