#tabitha dean

“When the sun sets into a clear, crisp horizon and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become at the final moment a backlit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray. The last ray of the dying sun to refract and bend beneath the horizon is the green ray, which is just slower than the red or the yellow ray. Sailors see more than the rest of us, and they have come to signify the sun the harbinger of great change or fortune in their lives. For years I have sought out the green ray...but never have I seen it. And in the summer of last year, as I set off to a small, near inaccessible village off the West Coast of Madagascar, I had a quest to try and see if not film something that I could not imagine...As I took vigil evening after evening on that Morumbi beach looking out across the Mozambique channel and timing the total disappearance of the sun behind a single roll of film, I believed but was never sure I saw it...On the beach beside me were two others...infected by my enthusiasm for this elusive phenomenon...their video documentation was watched as evidence to prove that I hadn’t seen it either. But when my film fragment was later reproduced in England, there, unmistakably, defying solid representation on the single frame of celluloid, but existent in the fleeting movement of film frames, was the green ray, having proved itself too elusive for the pixellation of the digital world.”