I previously expressed a sense of fatigue towards the indefiniteness of life in a pandemic; a nagging sense of worry that I’d mostly been able to ward off, but now was becoming harder to ignore. Co-workers had shared rumors of an early-October return to work, which, with no word from my employer and an eye on news of rising COVID cases, I skeptically penciled into my internal calendar. Yet, up in Northern Wisconsin, during what I optimistically hoped would be a final “vacation” before this potential start date, I received official notice that our production would begin filming in a few weeks. After months of stasis, where a lack of routine and uncertainties about the future have been pillars of the day-to-day, it’s strange to have this pin dropped- a definite point marking the end of unstructured unemployment and the beginning of something else.
With this announcement about work, anxious queries about insurance coverage and budgeting immediately flipped to scattershot questions on all the granular logistics and details of working on a film set to thoughts of what life outside of work will look like. In an industry built on long hours, in a normal year, my job consumes my life. Now, working in an environment in close proximity to others, where exposure to outside people and places could disrupt the health and safety of the workplace, this feels particularly relevant. In the time of COVID, does work consume my life not just because of long hours, but because anything beyond work could have health consequences for other people? How is this all going to work? What happens if someone gets sick? Will a return to work further shrink my world? After months spent mostly in my apartment, can my world even shrink anymore?
I’m looking forward to going back to work. I’m excited to see people I haven’t seen for months (and to be around people in general…), to get back to a routine, to have tasks to accomplish, and to get out of my apartment with regularity. But I’m also nervous. This isn’t the usual return to work, it’s the familiar twisted and transformed into something different, yet recognizable. Amidst the swirling mental landscape of what it will be like and how it will work, I’m trying to calibrate my expectations, finding a balance between the anxieties of uncertainty and the begrudging acceptance that work this year isn’t going to be the same old thing.
In this current stage of pandemic life, I was beginning to feel my stamina crumble under the lack of definiteness, topped by the political discord that injects chaos and frustration into an already complicated time. Yet, if I had any assumptions that knowing when I would be going back to work would free me of uncertainties, this was a misconception. Knowing when work will begin again has alleviated some concerns and marks the end of what will then be six months of unstructured time. This information, though, has populated my thoughts with a new set of questions and uncertainties, which, now that other people are factored in, feel more difficult than when just trying to answer for myself. While this stage has an end date, uncertainty doesn’t. Perhaps that’s a life lesson that the pandemic has simply magnified at a larger and more terrifying scale. Maybe it’s not uncertainty that’s gnawing at me, but stasis. Life has been stagnant for so long; I’m ready for something different, even if it comes with its own unknowns.
XXX
Unlike my last trip up to Northern Wisconsin back in July, when comet NEOWISE and thousands of stars were visible amidst a moonless sky, a full moon grew over the course of the two weeks. As a cinematography student in film school, moonlight was one of those elusive lighting schemes- like television glow or flickering fire- that proved a challenge to recreate believably. It was always too blue, too bright, or the source too low to be believed as the moon in the sky.
Stepping onto the dock, I could feel the moonlight hitting my face, see it reflecting off the lake, and illuminating treetops. I found myself observing the light, trying to qualify and mentally catalogue it for future reference. Although dimmer than sunlight and cooler in color temperature, it possesses a similar hardness, but one that simultaneously casts strong shadows while retaining a sense of softness.
I attempted to capture some images of the light, photographic references. Focus proved a bit challenging in the dark, especially with the older lenses I was using, and I found it difficult to accurately translate what my eye was seeing into the camera. In some instances, I opted for longer exposure times in an attempt to see more, to see deeper into the darkness, resulting in images that are much brighter than the actual intensity of moonlight. Yet, experiments with shorter exposure times and ISO settings yielded images too underexposed. I never quite found the sweet spot and, playing with variations in color temperature settings, I never settled on one that felt perfect. However, I find these moonlit images interesting experiments that capture the wash of light that illuminates everything (even if the photographs’ exposures don’t quite replicate the actuality of moonlight). Some of the images with longer exposures almost feel like bizarre daytime scenes, if it weren’t for the stars in the sky…