Don Bartletti "Camp Selfie"
"Camp Selfie"
Don Bartletti
FEBRUARY 12, 2020 B.C. JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, CA.
A single 30 sec. long selfie made just days before the COVID19 caught up to all of us and stopped my freewheeling adventures in their tracks.
To the naked eye, my campsite was very, very dark. After 6 attempts and infinite patience, magic appeared out of the inky darkness.
My camera is on a rock & focused on the motorcycle. I clicked the shutter open and hustled out of the frame to the left and “painted” my vintage 1977 BMW with an LED flashlight for 1 second. Then I hurried around behind the tent with another blip of light. In the nick of time I stopped in the middle and washed my face with a third splash of light just before I heard the shutter snap shut.
During those 30 seconds that I was running around in near total darkness, ambient light from everything else was trickling into the camera: a zillion stars in the eastern sky, a northbound jet with it’s illuminated tail and the glow of the campfire on the 5-story boulders.
