When award-winning Key West photographer D. S. Wallace once was positioning for a nighttime shot of a shrimp boat moored at Stock Island, the vessel's captain figured something was amiss.
"What do you think you're doing?" the shrimper yelled.
Wallace explained he was setting a photograph of the beautiful way the boat's wooden hull was reflected in the dark placid water and invited the captain to have a look through the viewfinder.
After a hesitant stare through the lens, the captain exclaimed, "Yeah. It is beautiful. I've been running this boat for years, but I never saw it like that before."
That's one difference between a picture taker and a photographer.
Capturing small pieces of beauty is part of what Wallace is trying to do as a photographer, but that's just the starting point.
Series photographs based on boats and other objects taken in darkness assume a reality of their own once they are printed and matted. In the hands of the artist, the prints not only preserve that particular moment the film was exposed but also often exhibit contrasts and lighting effects even more intense or subtle than what was originally before the camera.
Which makes them worth looking at again and again.
The series, called the NightVision Project, is included in a 90-piece retrospective of Wallace in Key West that will run through Oct. 6 on the first floor of the Key West Museum of Art & History.