[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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(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.'"
