Written by If you own a camera, you have probably done it. If you own a camera and a telephoto lens, I’ll be amazed if you haven’t done it. Done what? Photographed the moon of course.
The most memorable art lesson I had at school was when I was taught how to mix the colour grey. Not, as you might think, by mixing black and white but by taking a bit of blue, adding some yellow and then some red. White was added last of all to lighten the tone as required. I now know that this is called a tertiary grey. I was too young at the time to understand such a grown-up word and my teacher called it a colour grey. That was a valuable lesson learnt; grey can hold a colour.
What colour would you say that the moon is? Rising or setting, it can appear to be anything from straw yellow to blood red. By the time it’s hanging high in the sky on a clear night, it looks bright and white with patches of grey. And that’s where our description usually ends, reinforced by the fact that most photographs of the moon shown by astro-photographers have been deliberately de-saturated to black and white for maximum impact. Just like the one shown above.
This is the original (non black and white) photograph. You are probably thinking that it still looks like an ordinary mix of bright and dull patches. Look closer at the duller parts. Look long enough and you may see many subtle variations. That’s because these bland looking patches aren’t as innocent as they look and their secrets can be teased out with a bit of care.
By taking my time, making sure that I get an exposure that shows as much detail as possible and is as neutrally colour balanced as conditions allow, I have a picture that I can work with. By patiently adjusting saturation levels in Photoshop those lunar greys can be persuaded to reveal their hidden colours. Using the photograph that I’m showing you here, I end up with this result.
My picture was taken with a camera and telephoto lens. If I stretched my budget and bought an astronomical telescope, I would probably be able to get a more stunning result. If I took things to extremes and multiplied my budget a couple of hundred million times or more, I could do what NASA has done. Theirs is an extreme example that was taken by the Galileo spacecraft during its kamikaze mission to Jupiter.
NASA describes their psychedelic tour de force as a false-colour mosaic that reveals a treasure trove of scientific information. I think of my modest effort as an exaggerated colour image. After all, I’m only having a bit of fun while trying to bring out what is already there, even if it is cleverly disguising itself as shades of grey.
Not so photographers. We glory in the shortfall (of which there has been plenty in 2012) and romanticise the gap. Writing and talking about the blessed moments when we snatch some sort of victory from the jaws of defeat. The end result in itself doesn’t have to be overly dramatic or attention grabbing, merely something satisfactory that we managed to tease out of apparently nothing.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, it’s because when we are wallowing in that gap we find out what kind of photographer we really are. And if we, having faced the dark demons of our psyche that lurk there, can crawl back out on the other side with something we really like, it proves without a shadow of a doubt that we are the kind of photographer that we always knew we were – brilliant.
So what do you do when faced with endless bad weather and no end in sight? Take a holiday? Been there, done that, my wife bought the tee shirt and I lost a pair of binoculars. It was raining before we went and it was still raining when we came back, and it’s still raining now.
I’d stopped to take a documentary shot of boldly coloured rock where iron ore is being leached out by ground water. It was the almost luminescent colours that caught my eye. I’ll often take pictures of unusual things like this; I’ve lost count of the number of times ‘she who must be obeyed’ will be working on some document or other and call out ‘have you got any photographs that show …… (insert obscure subject as required)? One day this picture may well come to my rescue.
Try and picture this scene from, hmm, it must be about ten years ago. Chilled by frigid, pre-sunrise air I’m shuffling my feet to keep warm at the edge of a lake at Bosque del Apache nature reserve in New Mexico, waiting. Before me in the twilight are up to ten thousand honking snow geese. The end of their overnight roost will soon be noisily announced as they lift of en masse and I’m eagerly looking forward to experiencing this spectacle of nature.
This occasional blog is a tasty serving of nature and wildlife photography, with a side dish of my experiences out in the field and lightly seasoned with any random thoughts that occur to me along the way.
