The Rising Moon

[The first day's comments have been posted.]

As you might recall, I'm a lunatic. The moon is one of those things, like new-fallen snow, that for some unknown reason I think I have to photograph. I was heading to a meeting the other night when I crested a rise and saw this, so I had to hop out of the car and try a picture. A beautiful full moon rising over Seneca Lake. Of course all I had with me was the phone [unhappy face emoticon].

I hope you can see the picture okay. It's tough to get the density right on the blog because some people see pictures brighter on their monitors and some people see them darker. So when you're trying to hit the edge—almost dark but not quite, like here—it can get dicey. There is only a particular register where it sings, or hits the right key. Click on it to enlarge it and it might be a little better.

Pictures with predominantly mid-tones have more tolerance for being too light or dark. It's one of the big advantages of a print—you can get the values exactly right, and then they're set, or fixed. Of course then you have to worry about the viewing light—brighter light will open the shadows; dim, weak light (as is now favored by many museums, very unfortunately), will block the shadows and dull the highlights. (Many photos in museums now, although honored by being exhibited, remain mute and shrouded.) So there's no free lunch.

The detail is extremely murky in most of this picture, as you can see in the 100% detail below from the middle of the frame. But the interesting thing about that, and the reason I thought I'd bring it up for discussion, is that although it's far from sharp—the leaves of the oak look almost impressionistic, like brushstrokes—is that this level of detail works fine for an after-sunset picture. That's because our eyes (well, my eyes, anyway) see that way. I don't see distinctly in the near-dark. I don't know, maybe you do?

The detail is very vague, as in certain kinds of figurative paintings.

I did have to graft in a fake moon. It's the same size and position as the full moon that was there in reality, the but the phone couldn't handle the highlights, so I performed a little Photoshop surgery. Don't tell anyone.

Here's a strange habit I have...every time I stop to take a picture, or most times, I turn around and take a picture in the opposite direction after I'm done. Here's that one:

It's not a compulsion, but I've been doing this for years. It started many years ago when I was doing a project with a view camera in the northern tip of the lower part of Michigan. I was getting frustrated by the tyranny of the frame—my own tendency to pluck out little picturesque arrangements from out of the unruly landscape. (It's a form of lying, this selection.) One day, aware that I was just playing little games and deploying the same tricks over and over, and feeling disgusted about it, I just swung the camera around and took a picture in the opposite direction—and it turned out to be pretty good! Generally they're not, but I guess I just like to make a record of where I was, so I can get a sense of what was outside of the frame of the first picture. It lets the first picture breathe, in a way.

I used to love illustrators when I was a kid, and was a fan of people like Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth, Nancy Ekholm Burkert (who was a friend of the family) and Gustave Doré. A book about Wyeth talked about "easel pictures," by which they meant single, standalone paintings, as opposed to book illustrations which were obviously sets of pictures. I guess "easel pictures" were also painted from life. It introduced to me the idea of single images versus pictures in sets or series. Most photographs tend to work best in sets or series; one photograph is seldom enough to express an idea or describe a story.

As an aside, I never lost my taste for illustrated books, and consider it a shame that only children's books are seen as being fit to illustrate. I'd like it if every book were illustrated. Why shouldn't books like The Accidental Tourist or The Omnivore's Dilemma or The Road or The Known World be published with twelve or twenty commissioned illustrations approved by the author, like Dickens' Phiz or Dodgson's Tenniel? Do we not have artists? But that's not the convention. A shame. I have some first edition Mark Twains (inherited), and they're illustrated on almost every page. (That's a spread from the original edition of Life on the Mississippi in the inset.)

The eyes we've got
And speaking of seeing indistinctly in the dark, I had my eye appointment the other day. Happy to say I passed with flying colors—everything is good, said Dr. Holly, and I don't need new glasses this time, which is a relief. Throughout the process of getting my cornea replaced I've had to get new glasses several times. It's an expense.

This is probably the last of the phone pictures for a while. These were taken right before the new Sony got here.

Parting words for this Wednesday—here's a trick. Take the cardboard inner tube of a roll of paper toweling, or make something similar, say from a rolled-up magazine. Then open the top picture on your monitor, close one eye, and, with the other eye, look at the dark foliage through the cardboard tube. Interesting, huh? It has the same effect as turning up the ambient lighting on a physical print.

Mike

P.S. And a brief blog note: I had thought the three-posts-a-week format was not working out very well, but then the "Soiling of Old Glory" post on Monday got the most views of anything in nearly a month. I didn't see that coming! I do need to learn to be more scheduled to give the new format a fighting chance.

Book o' the Week

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford. Although I would never actually let anyone tell me not to photograph anything, this is a fun book for getting "the lay of the land" as what subjects and treatments are common. There are some nice insights, and it's a pleasant read, although I think it will be more fun if you already know a lot about photography and can relate to the subjects he discusses.

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Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "Nice photograph, Mike!

"The single greatest challenge (or dilemma) of photographic printing is deciding how to distribute the value range of the image across the very limited tonal scale of a photographic print, from paper white to D-Max. That's what the 'Zone System' is all about. Digital image processing and inkjet printing makes it a lot simpler mechanically than in the darkroom, but you still have to make some decisions based on what you want the print to 'say.'

"Landscape painting presents exactly the same challenge. Starting from a blank canvas, you deliberately structure the painting's value range to say something. Dark and moody or bright and sunny, it's all in your hands. The standard teaching from skilled landscape painters is that photographs are inadequate as a source of painting information because of blocked up shadows, distorted colors, and perspective errors. That has not been my experience. My 30 years of landscape photography mean I'm capturing (in my humble opinion) much better image files than most painters work from. I make conscious decisions about shadow value range and color balance when I'm taking photographs knowing I'll be using them as the starting point for paintings.

"Charles Cramer trained me to understand how to pitch the shadow values in an inkjet print properly, so they read as shadow but aren't lost in the murk. Painters have the same problem; if I paint with bright light on my easel, the painting will be far too dark for viewers to see into the shadows in dim room light.

"Right now I'm working up a painting based on photos and thumbnail sketches of that same full moon I made last week on the way to work, as it was setting just before sunrise. The goal is a painting that lets you smell the damp earth and feel the chilly pre-dawn air."

Martin Pallett: "First time I've commented, but just have to say how much I enjoy your site and the contents therein. The phone image is very pleasing and I would be happy had I taken it, would look good as a print. Keep up the good work Mr. Johnston!"

Mike replies: Thank you Martin, and good to hear from you.

Bruce Bordner: "You got really lucky—the low angle light looks almost artificial. And always shoot behind you at sunset! I love this type of image, but it is a pain to display no matter how you do it. Take a print outside in the sunlight if you want to see everything. It's just a reflective medium, and you don't get colors not in the light. The 'easel pictures' effect is another problem for me—I have 13,000(?) images at Flickr but less than 200 that make good standalone prints. (In the 'Prints in Waiting' album for convenience.) I do more slideshows in effect by creating albums. Still, I have no idea what people are seeing when they open a 36MP file on their phone.... My only popular image is 'Panopticon Pussy,' so I give up in trying to be popular. Everyone told me 'you should sell that!' on every print but not one gave me money so I just do it for fun. It's good enough to share getting lucky. Few actually observe the world anymore."

Kent Wiley: "Your non compulsion to turn around and photograph the opposite direction sounds familiar. For a while a large format landscape photographer, I'm now more 'democratic' in my selection of viewpoints. Or is it indecisive? I'm collecting environmental views—on video—that encompass 360 degrees, from all 50 states, so the decisions about what to look at are either non existent—or infinite. It should be displayed as four different streams on the four walls of one room. Here's a single stream taste so far."

Jim Freeman: "I have found that, in many cases, the scene behind makes a better picture than what initially caught your eye. Also, this is one of your best posts, new format or old."

Jonathan Morse: "A 19th- and 20th-century author who thought deeply about illustration was Henry James, who loved illustration himself but didn't want illustrators to distract readers' attention from his envisioned reality with theirs. So when the time came for James to publish a collected edition of his novels, each volume bore only one illustration: a frontispiece photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. James's language in those books was one actuality and Coburn's photography was another: a complement, not a competition. Want a philosophical short story about that? Try James's 'The Real Thing.'"

Comments

[Aaron]

RE "It's a form of lying, this selection." I don't think that's true. Every photo--without exception--is a kind of selection. No photo captures everything, not even a landscape photo. Or, maybe you meant the "picturesque" is the lie? But, why? When I'm out and about without a camera I regularly pick out 'picturesque' pieces of my visual environment--the way the light falls on a singular tree, or the colors and shapes of the fruit at the grocery store, or whatever. Or, maybe you mean limiting your photos to picturesque scenes is the lie? But, once more, doesn't every photographer at least some of the time have tendencies toward certain sorts of photos or compositions? Is that lying? Or just a particular visual or pictorial interest?

Here's an alternative proposal: Maybe the lie or the inauthenticity isn't in the particular selection itself (no matter how picturesque or overdone) but the degree to which the photographer isn't actually seeing the scene for what it is or its intrinsic artistic potential. But, rather the photographer may be seeing the scene as nothing but a kind of representation of what other pictures have done before, a representation that can be forced onto the scene--perhaps even successfully--but that nevertheless misses the scene itself. I'm thinking here of a lot of glowing sunset pictures. Many of them are indeed beautiful. But, it's sort of like the 'sunset glow' becomes the point of the photograph and not the richness of the scene itself, or the photographer sees the scene only as the excuse for the sunset glow, or something like that. I'm not sure that there's a moral problem with that, but perhaps it still a kind of artistic lie or inauthenticity insofar as it reduces the richness of the scene to a pre-made type.

[In connection with this issue I think of a certain display in a bookstore that exists no longer back in Wisconsin. It was the section for travel books. The books were typically slender enthusiast photo books, full of pretty, conventional pictures of places that would now be called "iconic"--the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triumphe for Paris, etc. I had been to Ireland, so one day I picked up a picture book for Ireland, and was struck by how greatly it did NOT resemble the country I had experienced. From the book you would think Ireland was full of bucolic landscapes, picturesque ruins, grand old houses, and only occasionally a freckled red-haired lad or lass in traditional costume. That's what I mean by lying. To illustrate it to yourself, imagine one day you have been assigned to show your own local area at its very best, for the tourist board; then, the next day, go out with the intention of being a documentary photographer, showing the area just as a visitor would experience it, warts and all as it were, without flinching or prettifying it. You'd probably come up with two very different sets of pictures, wouldn't you? --Mike]

[Richard Man]

I heard/read about the advice of turning around and take pictures of the "backside" from a few places, including yours, and I have made it a habit to do 360 sweep whenever I stop to take a photo

[Phil]

The density looks just fine to me on my 6-year-old iMac 4K. In fact, both the inline and "embiggen'd" versions look great. The detail of the foliage looks just right for my eyes, too. I might have the same near-dark vision as you. In fact, I am fine to drive a car without glasses during the day but as soon as it starts getting dark, even before sunset on a grey day, I have to put glasses on. My vision starts to feel strained and uncertain if I don't.

[Ernest Zarate]

“I do need to learn to be more scheduled to give the new format a fighting chance.”

Yes, well, we are talking a relationship here, right? And relationships are built on both give and take. But it has to be both. Can’t be just one or the other, or that relationship is going to go up in flames or whither on the vine.

I truly enjoy your blog, and your writing, as you know. But yeah it’s a good idea to hew to your word, once you freely give it. It’s the timeline you wanted.

[It just takes a little adjustment is all. A lot going on in my life right now. But I'll get there. --Mike]

[ChrisC]

The painted look is actually quite common in a range of situations with iPhone cameras if you look into the detail.

From the look behind photo, you were probably 5, maybe 10 minutes too late to get the moon properly exposed, but still get some light to the surroundings.

[David Aiken]

I wouldn't call the framing selection "lying", I'd probably prefer to call it the first abstraction in a s series of abstractions which end up as the eventual photograph. We start by selecting a part of what we see as "the scene" and then we continue by tinkering with whatever the camera actually captures in order to get it to look the way we think the scene actually looked or the way we think the scene should have looked, or "pretty" or "gritty" or something else.

What we don't end up with is what we actually saw but then what we remember is never what actually happened. Photographs are no more accurate than our memory, even when we're intent upon "telling the truth", and we don't go around saying that what we remember is a lie though we freely admit to its "subjectivity" and failings.

Interestingly there's always a large element of selection involved when we share one of our memories in some way, we never share every little aspect of our memory. We tell what we think is important in order to communicate what we wish to communicate. Our photographs are like that, we select what we want to show people in order to communicate whatever it is we wish to communicate by sharing the photograph.

[Markus Fischer]

The image has two centers of interest - the moon and the trunk of the tree. I keep oscillating between the two and cannot decide if this is interesting or just irritating - which may have been exactly your intention?

[Thomas Walsh]

This very good iPhone 7 photo is an excellent example of why the camera business is suffering. All but the purists are going to print much above 4x6 (if they even bother to print), only a very small group will enlarge their photos 100% and pixel peep, fewer still will care about whether or not it has impressionistic looking brush strokes. I played with an iPhone 13 the other day and in a word it is brilliant. There is a dialogue from the Chronicles of Riddick that may apply: Riddick: You said it's all circling the drain - the whole universe. Right? Imam: That's right. Riddick: Had to end sometime.

[JOHN B GILLOOLY]

Well I remember you jonesing for the Sony A6600. You mentioned the other day that you ordered a "new camera." Then I saw a quick slip-in of the new Sony. But you haven't confirmed what the purchase was right?

[Jens]

I like the natural framing of the moon by using the branches. It is catching the moonrise at a critical moment or standing in just right place with your camera.

[janekr]

" The moon is one of those things, like new-fallen snow, that for some unknown reason I think I have to photograph."
For me it is balloon flying over my cottage! When I see any of them above, I run to grab my camera, change lens to tele and make photos.

[Geoff Wittig]

Jonathan Morse-
William James and his brother, the philosopher and pioneering psychologist Henry James, were deeply engaged with their contemporaries in the art world, particularly Pictorialist photographers and Tonalist painters. Both spent a lot of time pondering the complex interactions between visual perception, consciousness, and memory. So William James' reluctance to permit illustrations to compete with his 'word pictures' was well informed.

[Jonathan Morse]

Thanks very much for your note about my Henry James comment, Geoff Wittig. Its specific interest for TOP is spelled out in the retrospective preface to The Golden Bowl in the collected ("New York") edition of James's novels. There, James tells us how he searched London with the Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn not for conventional illustrative material but for "images always confessing themselves mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that thing."

But yes, it was Henry who was the novelist and his brother William who was the psychologist.

[Ramón]

This thing you do, taking a picture of whats in the opposite direction of what interested you in the first place, sounds like a great idea for a coffee book! (self published or otherwise) I keep pushing my friends to do a book, I think that way I will end up doing my own too.