Nightwatch

Noel Kerns is a Texas-based photographer who specializes in capturing ghost towns, decommissoned military bases, and industrial abandonments by night. "Light-painting is all about vision," says Kerns. His images incorporate two distinct photographic techniques: time-exposure by the natural light of a full moon, and the artful application of artificial light, vividly "painted" into the scene while the camera's shutter is open.

It's the ability to imagine the scene you want to emerge from the darkness, and then to execute it in such a way as to match or surpass what you imagined." Nightwatch is the first book from Kerns, one of the world's foremost practitionerst of the art of light-painting. "Or more accurately, pre-vison. Join him as he ventures into the darkness of the American Southwest, exploring remote desert ghost towns under a full moon, or prowling the abandoned, seemingly post-apocalyptic structures of America's industrial wastelands.

In his photographs, Kerns captures the world surreal: flowing cloudstreaks in a night sky, the laser-like light trails of cars racing by on a highway, a raging ocean shoreline rendered eerily calm through long exposure. Kerns shares with the reader a nocturnal world that reveals its dreamlike details only when time, moonlight, and the light-painter's hand combine to tell the story.