Is Time a series of moments, or is it the space in between those moments?by T.S. Sullivan
It constantly moves forward. It constantly changes. By the time we get started analyzing that moment, the next moment has changed it. The initial moment 
becomes blurred, distorted by the next moment. The longer between moments, the more it becomes unrecognizable to us. This is the world we live in. But, we insist that we can stop time with a photograph, that we can obtain that “Decisive Moment”. But, just the act of viewing that moment at a later moment alters that captured moment by the new data we have absorbed in our brains since that time. Have you ever looked at a photograph when it is finally in print or monitor viewable form, and it looks nothing like what you remember when you pressed the shutter button? Is this your faulty memory, or is it your memory altered by the facts you have received since taking that photograph?
I propose that it is the latter.
But, we still have all these moments stored in our minds and in our pictures. Are they now a useless piece of imagery? Are they even the truth any more? Were they ever? Does it matter, actually?
What if one could capture a series of moments? Not as a “motion picture”, but as a still moving picture. Would this now be closer to the truth?
I suggest that it would be.
But, a still moving picture would be just a blurred mess, would it not? Or, is it that Time is not a moment, nor is it a sequential series of moments, but that Time is the space in between. Time IS the “In Between Moments”.
I always have a camera with me.
Making a photograph is not an event for me. Seeing the image, noticing it out of the millions of other visual stimuli hitting my 
eyes every second, is the event. It is not an “event” as in a parade, or bank robbery, or birthday party, etc. It is an event of life. Some small portion of life that just happens to pass before my eyes. Sometimes I even forget to press the shutter button, having been so enthralled with just seeing the sight. Luckily that doesn’t happen too often.
The past couple of years I have been creating images that attempt to present the event as I initially saw it with my eyes. Not the actual “historical recording” of the event, but the feeling, emotion, the thought that occurred in my body and mind when first discovering this event. These are events in time, of time, extensions of the moment, where the initial encounter transcends the moment and creates it’s own timeline.
I noticed Street Photography for the first time, roughly November of 2000. Shortly after I saw my first blurred motion photograph, and as they say, that was that. I was hooked.
But, it was just a fascination with “blurred motion” photography. I just thought it looked cool. And kind of figured, heck, I could move a camera during exposure just as good as the rest of them doing it. Little did I realize just how hard it was to make a blurred picture look like something other than just a mistake of moving the camera at the wrong time, that there actually had to be a rhyme and reason to it all. There had to be “Poetry” about it. On the Photo site I was frequenting at the time, I even took up an Anon entitled Poetry. It took a while to come to the realization that there was a wrong way and a right way to blur an image. It was, for instance, a major surprise 
to me that a large majority of really good blurred motion shot required a large depth of field. Yes, as much as possible had to be sharply rendered in the image. This allows the blur to have distinct lines and movement patterns to it.
Blurred motion requires the photographer to find a beat in the event they are capturing. For this, “Street” based photography seems to work the best. Everyone always says that the city has it’s own pulse. You have to find that beat, and move with it. Most of the time you take the picture on the upbeat. This is where the pulse of blurred motion photography is, in between the beats, in between the moments. I just mentioned that Street based photography seemed to work best. Well, having started out essentially with nature as my main form of photography, I had to see if I could also do the equivalent with it. Yes, I can. Nature moves in a beat. Just ask the nature photography what wind does to them, they know there is a pattern. Nature blurred motion is all about finding that. Finding the in between of the still in nature.
Now, what does all that mean? Does it even mean anything? Or am I just making up all this to justify my fascination with moving a camera during exposure. Personally, I think most of what visual artists write about their work is made up. We are so tuned into producing a visually poignant image, relying on our own inner voices, that converting it to words is the last thing on our minds when we create that visual piece of art. What I said above is only, at best, an approximation of what is actually going on when I do all this.
And then again, it probably has all changed since the moment I first started writing all this.
I invite you to enter in between the moments of my life. It’s my Time I’m recording here. It’s my way of seeing “In Between Moments."
