Thanks for attending my Landscape Astrophotography discourse with the San Jose Astronomical Association on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM. Most of the audience are Astrophotographers.
Below is a form you can fill out and we will email you a PDF of the notes from this lecture. Following are some brief excerpts from the talk.
The Meeting of Earth and Sky
Big Sur, California, has earned a reputation for being The Greatest Meeting of Land & Sea, a phrase attributed to Robinson Jeffers, the “Walt Whitman” of the West Coast. Indeed living here is inspiring. The towering cliffs and mountains, lush forests, crashing, craggy Pacific surf all work together to evoke a sense of beauty and wonder that is astonishingly intimate. There are certainly other beautiful places in the world – even nearby. But I believe that there is awesome, virtually undiscovered beauty that touches nearly everywhere in the world: the night sky.
Night Sky photography has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decades. Prior to the age of digital photography, there were relatively few painters of the night sky. Not surprisingly, none of those painters painted just stars. All featured stars with landscapes. Perhaps the most well-known painter of the night is Vincent Van Gogh. In Van Gogh’s day, light pollution was far, far less noxious than it is now. Indeed our super abundance of artificial light has rendered our night sky almost unobservable. But the night sky has such depth and mystery that everyone should find a dark sky to sit under for a time. Part of the allure of the night sky is its expansiveness… its immense scale.
Because the scale of the night sky is difficult to grasp I believe it is important to link human-scale to the starry night. Deep-sky photography of nebula and galaxies reveals things completely unseen or unseeable by the naked eye – and the revelation of those objects is compelling and engaging. But even more compelling are photographs that tie humanly identifiable scale to the mysterious night.
In addition to scale, compelling photographs reveal the unexpected. Photographs can show time, location, relationships, colors, and details that are unobservable by looking. To draw lay people, however, I believe there must be a strong link between what is observable with what is not: a Marriage of Earth and Sky. And for that reason, I’m urging Astrophotographers and astronomers to try Landscape Astrophotography.
This is truly a meeting of Land, Sea and Sky
For more details, please see the accompanying notes.
- How to Make Images Memorable
- Scale / Grandeur
- Connectedness
- Interest
- Revelation
- Impact of Photos
- How to Create Scale / Grandeur
- How to Connect - Interest and Familiarity
- Revelatory Photographs
- Time | Location | Relationships | Familiarity | Seeing Differently | Surprising Colors | Intricate Detail
- Inspiration from Painting
- A sense of place
- An Astrophotography Idea
- Conclusion
- Resources and References
Other articles on this site that you may find relevant include:
- What Makes An Image Memorable?
- Adding Special Touches to Your Astro Landscape
- The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques
- The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques Part 2
- The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques Part 3
If this is a request to comment on the photo, it’s nice. But with closer examination it appears to be a combination of several images judging by the light and shadows on the rocks in the foreground compared with and the large rocks in the water
Well, we weren’t requesting comments. But you’re incorrect. The details of this image are shown if you click the image itself (it takes you to Flickr).
It’s a single exposure with some heavy handed Photoshop work to tone down what was an overbright area at the left caused by my extremely bright light.
The light painting was all done during the course of one 20 second exposure.