A Little Night Photography or The Photographers must be crazy

December 10, 2011 at 0300 hours I roll out of bed and dress in the cold darkness. Gathering the pile of photo gear by the front door I load the dusty green Montero and start the engine.  Within minutes I am rolling down a dark nearly deserted freeway on my way to another photographic adventure. Above me the moon shines through a thin veil of clouds. I am not alone.  I know that countless other photographers around the world, ignoring the sane advice of friends and spouses, are rising up in the darkness with the hopes of photographing a lunar eclipse.

I had plotted and planned for days.  A lunar eclipse would make a nice addition to my gallery.  In the past my attempts had always been thwarted by the capriciousness of nature. I have an ongoing project photographing the moon as it sets at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse south of San Francisco (Pigeon Point Gallery link).  I turn my car towards the coast.

Arriving about 4:40 AM I find that my timing is off and the eclipse has begun.  I park my car, grab my photo bag and tripods and strike off hurriedly across the fields.  Once at my chosen location on the ocean bluff I rapidly set up my two tripods and attach the cameras.  A quick test shot affirms my exposure and I compose my image.  The plan is to take one photo every 5 minutes throughout the eclipse.  I will later blend the images together in Photoshop. After getting the primary camera up and my first exposure done I turn and look back towards the highway to where my car is parked. A faint yellow glow in the distance tells me that my dome lights are on. A faulty switch has been plaguing me for the last few weeks causing the lights to go on at random times.  A moment of panic grips me.  Do I abandon my post or take the chance that my battery will last three hours?  Well, I do have AAA road service and the next eclipse is sometime in 2014.  I stay by my camera dutifully taking an exposure every 5 minutes.  At 6:06 AM the total eclipse commences just as the moon is descending into a bank of fog. By 6:15 AM the moon is out of sight.  I make a mad dash to the car and turn off the dome light.  I return to my camera and wait to see if the fog will break and the moon reappear.

How I created this Photograph

This image is made up of 23 images taken during the December 10, 2011 lunar eclipse.  The camera, a Canon 5DmkII with 24-105 L lens, was set to manual.  ISO was set at 200.  For the first exposure I set the shutter speed to 1/60 and the f-stop at 16.  Once the moon was less than half visible I changed the shutter speed to 1/30.  When the moon was less than a quarter visible I changed the shutter speed to 1/15. When just the edge of the moon was lit I went to a full 1 second exposure. For the images taken after the full eclipse began I opened the aperture to f/5.6 and increased the exposure to 2 seconds. If the moon had made it to total eclipse while still visible I would have increased the ISO to 800 to capture detail in the dark face of the moon.  Later I chose my base image (actually a composite of 3 images made at different intervals during the eclipse) and created a layer for each of the 19 moon images and another layer of the stars taken of the dark sky when the moon was eclipsed. (Hint: be sure to hold the shift key when dragging each of the images into a layer.  This will align the images correctly.). I then set the layer blending mode to “screen” for each of the layers.

Sea Lions were known to the Spanish explorers of early California as Sea Wolves.  Point Lobos derived its name from the Spanish Punta de los Lobos Marinos. Today, the rocky point south of Carmel is still home to a large colony of California Sea Lions, Zalophus californianus, and as in those early days their barking is carried to shore on the prevailing winds.  It was the sound of this barking that caught my ear while photographing just north of Weston Beach in the reserve.  Raising my binoculars I could see the sea lions silhouetted by the setting sun perched on the rugged rocks.  The surf was pounding and sending plumes of spray skyward.

Punta de los Lobos Marinos

Lured by the siren sounds of the distant barking I made my way over to Sea Lion Point.  Using my 400mm lens with a 1.4 teleconverter on my Canon 7D (890mm  lens equivalent) on a tripod with a gimbled head I was able to make these photographs across the expanse known as the Devil’s Cauldron that separates the Point from Sea Lion Rocks.

California Sea Lions

California Sea Lions at Sunset, Point Lobos

We have all been told that in order to take better photographs we need to learn to see as the camera sees. We are taught that our eyes see selectively while the camera records in exact detail what is in front of it. On an intuitive level we understand that there is a filtering mechanism in place with our eyes. Our brains process the information that our eyes take in. But just what is the mechanism by which this filtering occurs and how do we teach ourselves to see beyond the filters and develop photographic vision.

As I was reading a book, “Traffic and Why We Drive the Way We Do” By Tom Vanderbilt, I came across an interesting study that helped put everything in perspective. In a well known psychological test subjects were shown a video in which there was a circle of people passing around a basketball. Half the people had on white shirts and the other half wore black shirts. The test subjects were asked to count the number of passes while watching the video. At least half of the subjects involved in the study did not notice that a person wearing a gorilla suit passed through the circle of basketball players. These subjects suffered from a phenomenon known as “inattentional blindness.” (You can see the original video HERE )

How could someone miss something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit? The explanation is that there is an unlimited amount of information around us, but our capacity to process that information is limited. The subjects in this test missed the appearance of the gorilla suit either because they were looking for something else or because something came along that they were not expecting. What this study shows is just how selective our vision is even when we think we are paying full attention. Daniel Simmons, a coauthor of the gorilla study wrote, “If you’re limited in how many things you can pay attention to, and attention is a gateway to consciousness, then you can only be aware of a limited subset of what is out there.”

What do gorilla suits have to do with photographic vision? The common belief is that we first see a scene and then interpret it. In reality there is evidence that what you have in mind actually precedes your perception and affects what you see. The concept that our expectations and knowledge influence what we see in a scene is the essence of photographic vision. We must train ourselves to recognize a set of values, an “attentional set,” that make for great photographs. In other words we must learn to see the gorilla in the picture.

Before you all jump on a plane to Rwanda, let me just remind you that that I am speaking metaphorically. The gorilla I refer to is the set of values that we must program ourselves to see. Not only must we be able to see the elements that make a photograph, but we must at all times be ready for the unexpected.

Photographic vision can be divided into 3 categories;
1. The decision to create an image which leads to choice of subject matter and style.
2. The nature of light which can be broken down into color, direction and quality.
3. Composition which is the arrangement of visual elements within the image.

Over the next few weeks in this Blog I will explore each of these categories as well as offer tips on how to train your eye, but, before I go I want to mention that there is a fourth area of consideration. That is the unintended photograph or “happy accidents” that can sometimes lead to great images or even whole new genres of photography. This is probably what John Szarkowski had in mind when he said “The camera has ideas of its own”.