Austin is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony – a million and a half Mexican Freetail bats emerge to feed on insects from under the Congress Avenue Bridge at twilight every evening between March and November. Each year, they attract 100,000 tourists who come to watch them fly. We boarded a small boat that carried through Lady Bird Lake and the Columbia River at sunset, arriving at the bridge just before the bats emerged at dusk. I quickly realized that photographing the streaming lines of bats in flight would be virtually impossible. Our eyes could easily define the clouds of bats that flowed overhead, but our cameras couldn’t -- not in such low light. Bats fly extremely fast – too fast to freeze after sunset. So I decided instead to turn a “lemon into lemonade” by creating an image that says more about the atmosphere surrounding the event, than the flight of the bats themselves. Because the bats are subordinated, the image requires additional verbal context, supplied by this caption, in order to work as expression. If this image was intended to stand on its own, it would fail, because the “bats” appear here as soft blurs in the sky, looking more like faint specs of dirt, than flying mammals. The spectators, on the other hand, are standing still for me. Using a 24mm wideangle lens, I was able to build my picture around their silhouetted forms lining the bridge over the Columbia River. The bats are phantoms, a faint smudge line floating between the clouds and the bridge below them. The bridge itself glows in the half-light, illuminated by streetlights. The lights cast a golden reflection on the Columbia, while the illuminated hotel in the background turns the water a brilliant red. Between these reflections and the bats are the spectators – a long fence-like row of men, women, and children. They have come to see a natural spectacle – one they will never forget.