Rajab Hilal 1430
The new crescent moon (or Hilal in Arabic) of the 7th month of the Islamic Calendar, known as Rajab, was sighted this evening at 8:40 pm PDT from Russsian Ridge Open Space Preserve in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a perfect afternoon with subtle but stunning colors and atmospherics. For moons, it just does not get better than this one. More on the afternoon preceeding this photo in a later post. Enjoy!
It amazes me how fast time progresses. Another month has gone by since my last post. In that time I tried to catch up on what has been going on photographically on some forums and other websites. I found myself reading some articles written by Joseph Holmes on high end digital and the ins and outs of putting together a medium format digital camera system and dealing with quality control issues as well as the importance of critical focus with such high end imaging equipment. Afterwards I felt like my endeavors in photography were not up to par, lacking, or somehow inferior.
In the past month I also made one trip in search of spring wildflower blooms. I only made two 4×5 photos, and neither was of flowers. I felt like I had missed spring. Then after reading up on high-end medium format digital, I felt like my meager attempts were just that.
And yet in the past month I sold several photos, all of which were made with the 4×5 except for one, which was made using a 10 MP DSLR camera. Each was exceptional in composition: Emerald Pool, Redwood Glow, Rippled Reflection, Autumn Meadow, Before The Heat, and The Test Of Time. Each photo is moving and each moved the patron who purchased them emotionally.
Then this evening, I went out moon sighting, as I do each month, with a 12 MP Nikon D2x digital camera in hand and a prime 400mm f/5.6 manual focus Nikon lens from the late 1980’s era. No thoughts of inadequacy entered my mind once them imagery began to excite my eyes.
Watching the sun go down across the San Francisco Bay among the haze and clouds and sea birds passing by whipped through the sky by a brisk frigid wind, I recalled reading an article years ago written by Galen Rowell who said (I paraphrase), no matter how often you see the same setting sun, something clicks inside and gets one into the business of making photos and nothing else matters. It was not the most exceptional sunset I had ever witnessed, but one that certainly set the mood for what I was to find.
Once the sun did set, the search in the western sky for that thin crescent moon began. After a while, I wondered if I would see it at all this night as the moon was only 23 hours old past conjunction and would only be 1.5% illuminated – a difficult moon to see at best. After about 20 minutes of not seeing it, my attention was diverted downwards to the exposed mud of the Hayward shoreline estuary on the east side of the San Francisco bay.
Visually very exciting with the various textures and cracks, the mud became an interesting subject. What made it even more exciting was that the unusual lighting provided by the remaining blue skylight reflected off the drier more bleached areas of the mud giving a surreal feel to the photograph.
Finally, about half an hour after the sun vanished I looked up and saw a small sliver of light appearing in the sky among the clouds. And again, the subtleties of that light came through and with a camera that pales in comparison to what the highest quality digital equipment can produce. Another moving image of the new moon was made.
This moon was incredibly fine. I lost it in the sky several times after seeing it. I was very happy to have seen it and record its appearance. But I think what impressed me more was that the camera was able to capture subtleties that my eye could not see as I looked on. In this photo, one can just barely make out the entire outline of the moon. The difference in the luminosity of the sky and the disk of the moon is so small that even in Photoshop the luminosity channel of the L*a*b color space only sees a 1% change, and in some spots not even that, as the cursor is moved across the outline of the moon.
Is this a perfect photo technically? No. It suffers from digital noise. It is not as sharp as it could be, although more than acceptable given that the large telephoto lens I was using was shaking quite a bit in that brisk wind. But it leads me to the question of inadequacy. What makes a camera system inadequate? Again, thinking about how I felt after reading those articles on high-end medium format digital camera systems, I began to think that the equipment I had and used was not up to snuff in producing great photos. But no more than 1 year ago, the Nikon D2x was the Nikon flagship camera, and it is a fine camera. Just a little bit over three years ago, nothing in the digital world could even touch the quality of 4×5 film. And according to Joseph Holmes, assembling a top of the line digital medium format camera system is non-trivial. Along with the high resolutions capable of such large sensors and computer designed digital lenses comes what appears to be real issue of quality control. And as outlined in his articles, in some cases, the results are quite poor given what they are capable of. In addition, ones technique behind such cameras becomes ultra-critcal as Micheal Reichmann wrote about on the Luminous-Lanscape article on the Phase One P65+.
This is all fine as it shows that digital equipment is reaching a pinnacle in capturing true to life images. But I have to ask myself, to what end? Do we need all that resolution? Do we need to concern ourselves, as photographers, about focus being one micron (0.000001 meters or 1/1000th of a millimeter) off? Does it matter for the web where unfortunately most of the digital photos end up? I suppose it comes with the advances in technology that we put this technology to the test, but in the end I think it does not amount to a hill of beans when the final photograph produced has little or no emotional value to the patron.
I am not privy to the sales information of other working fine art photographers, but I do wonder how many prints they sell of any given photograph made with such high-end expensive equipment. I know the argument of price vs. value is what gets thrown around when the price tag of such high end systems are brought up, but can they ever recoup the cost of the equipment?
Six years ago during the spring wildflower bloom in Gorman California, I was fortunate enough to have witnessed and photographed that epic bloom. At that time I toted two 35mm cameras, a Nikon F3 and a Nikon F4s, and a barrage of manual focus prime focal length lenses. Digital photography was just making its in-roads and the quality was just about to surpass that of 35mm film. On Easter Sunday morning of 2003 I found myself astounded at that bloom that covered the Gorman Hills. The number of people, photographers and wildflower enthusiasts alike, that had ignored the No Trespassing signs and climbed all over those hills was astounding. I did not however and was very frustrated at not being able to make a photo of just the flowers without having one or more people in the frame. Frustrated, I packed up my gear and proceeded to leave. At the freeway exit there at Gorman, I discovered a dirt road that paralleled Hwy 5 on the west side of the freeway and proceeded down that road. I was now quite a bit away from the hills themselves and had a much wider view. I attached the 400mm telephoto lens to my F4s and started to take intimate photos of the hills. The photo below was one that I came home with.
After The Rain
It has been my number one best selling image from the very first time I showed it. It was not unusual for a large 20×30 inch print to be sold each and every week, and sometimes two per week. Now take a look at a 100% crop of the detail found in a 20×30 enlargement.
It is absolutely nothing to brag about, in fact it is down right ugly. But it has not stopped patrons from marveling at the bloom depicted, amazed by all the color, and moved to unexplainable tears in some cases. But I can’t count the number of times that patrons have compared the 20×30 print to that of the work of Monet. And while I cannot make a claim that even pales next to Monet’s exceptional work, this photograph has been purchased by nearly 250 different patrons over the past six years. This one photo has literally paid off nearly every piece of photographic equipment that I own.
Now if this was not enough, my second best selling photograph, Another Time, again made using 35mm equipment, is poorly focused in the foreground, not by much, but in a 16×24 enlargement it is noticeable to photographers. And yet a framed 16×24 enlargement of that very photograph hangs in the office of the Archbishop William J. Levada in the Vatican in Italy! It was purchased and given to him as a going away gift in 2005 when he moved from San Francisco to the Vatican. He remarked at the time, with tears in his eyes, that it was the most moving photo of Yosemite that he had seen and being a native Californian, Yosemite was his most favorite place and visited there often and that he would be hanging this in his new office. This photo has sold over 120 times since it was made in November of 2001.
Now I am not recounting all of these stories and remarking on the quality of a D2x and old lenses to boast or make anyone believe that my work is anyway exceptional compared to others, in fact I am humbled by the work of many landscape photographers. On the contrary I am trying to point out that photographic equipment will only take a photographer so far. I am not saying that a lowly point and shoot camera can ever take the place of any high-end camera, nor am I saying that a good photo can be made using any camera. But what I want to point out is that as photographers we would not be lost without all of this new cutting edge technology. Yes the technology is remarkable. Yes incredible photos are being made with it. Yes it is stretching the envelope of what is capable. But it has to be in the hands of a capable artist for anything moving to come out of it that will be of any real worth to those who view it. And before you go out and take a second mortgage on your house to finance a top of the line digital medium or large format system, think about the last photo you made and what moved you to make it. Think about the resulting photograph and where it ended up. Was it on paper or did it end up on some web page? Did it move you as an image later the way it moved you when you first saw the scene? Did it move others in the way that it moved you?
Galen Rowell once said “I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn’t have a personal vision or doesn’t communicate emotion fails“. That is how I feel about photography as well and it is where I concentrate my energy now, and not on producing lifeless technically perfect images. A camera, no matter how advanced, cannot translate my vision and emotions alone without my artistic ability. And with out that then I would be lost.
It’s been another month. Yesterday I went out to look for the new crescent moon of Rabi’ Al-Awwal, the third month of the Islamic year, the month in which the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of God Upon him) was born. It is a good time. Unfortunately however, the moon was not seen yesterday. The clouds in the sky were thick and only a small window through the clouds was visible for us to look into. Nonetheless, the month has come to an end and today with clearer skies the new crescent moon was easily visible and I had the good fortune to spend about an hour with it as it slowly sank into the western sky.
Rabi Al-Awwal Crescent
When I photograph the moon I always think to myself, these photos will not be very interesting. The sky looks plain, the moon too thin and I think to myself how great it would be if the sky suddenly erupted in a blush of color. But after I return home and start working with the images, I am utterly amazed at how beautiful the moon is with all its subtleties.
Subtleties of the Moon
And then when the color does appear, it makes the moon stand out even more. One of the beautiful aspects of the moon is that it cycles. It always returns to this moment, like clockwork every month. It’s dependable, even if we can’t see it due to clouds or weather or some other reason, it always returns. It’s a promise that you can bank on. At the same time, it, just like everything else in creation is in a state of evanescence. It will vanish just like everything else. Here today and gone tomorrow.
Crescent in a blush of pink
Just like the light that lights the sky vanishes, so to will the moon and everything else for that matter, everything.
However, its only in the absence of something do we realize how important that thing was to us and what a blessing it was. And just when you think that you can’t do with out that blessing, you find that in its absence you can see things that you were never able to see when its brilliance was blinding you. You realize that even though all you can see is a small sliver of its light, its true nature is hidden by the make-up that covers it and in the shadows its true nature is revealed.
The Moon Revealed in Earth Shine
As the day came to a close and the final photo taken, I realized that no one is an island. Even though the moon tonight was the most brilliant object in the sky, it was not alone and could never be our moon if it was alone. For sharing the sky with the moon was Venus, our closest neighboring planet. Everything in nature has its counterpart – night and day, sun and moon, husband and wife, right and wrong.
The Moon and Venus
One cannot exist without the other. Everything in creation exhibits this quality. And it is only with this very quality can anything be perpetuated. If one side of the balance is upset it will upset the other side as well and send everything into an out of control chaotic spiral downward into destruction – May God protect us from that.
Today was the first day of fasting for the month of Ramadan this year.
Enjoying the afternoon
I lead a trip up to the Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve in the northern Santa Cruz mountians on Sunday after noon with about 20 people attending. We spent about two hours along one of the ridge trails in the preserve waiting for the sun to set so that we could start searching. We had a good time while we waited.
It was another perfect day for moonsighting. The sky was clear and visibility was excellent. Although it was clear and sunny we had mild temperatures in the upper 60’s.
As the sun began to set, we all anxiously waited to start searching. Although the sunset was quite impressive with its deep orange color, we had to really stop ourselves from looking to prevent the green spots from appearing in our eyes which would hamper seeing the delicate crescent moon.
Finally the sun had vanished below the horizon. It left us with sublte pastel colored skies.
However, try as we did, we could not see any sign of the new crescent moon. Even though is was a 30 hour old moon, its age determine from the moment it is in conjunction with the sun, it was low on the horizon, only about 3.5 degrees in altitude, and was only in the sky for 20 minutes after the sun set. Most 30 hour old crescents are easy to see in the sky after sunset, but this one was to low ont he horizon and set too soon after sunset.
In the end, no one in North America saw the crescent moon that evening. Making the month of Sha’ban a 30 day month and with Ramadan beginning on Tuesday September 2, 2008.
With one day now complete we look forward to a blessed month ahead of us.
Peace – Youssef
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