It’s photoshopped right? A total fake… No and sadly, ironically, that’s why I’ve never shared it anywhere because, well…sometimes life is stranger than fiction. It is real, I can even give the date and time, it was Sunday afternoon last winter on the eve of the Beaver Moon.
With the sun going down behind me the belt of Venus was spectacular and the moon was enormous because, as I mentioned it was the Beaver supermoon of November 24… I didn’t even realise it was the supermoon the following evening, I was busying myself taking images for a research project….
How come it looks so fake then?
In camera – I used two shots. I only had the 70-300mm lens with me which wasn’t so helpful, but you work with what you’ve got so the ponies in the bog would have been at the 70mm and the moon as a second shot at 300mm.
And then the edit…
I edit from my heart and soul, I want to recreate the sensations, feelings… the essence of the place and when I thought – what did it feel like? The first word was ‘unreal.’
Pictorialism is a style of photography that deliberately emphasises beauty and artistic expression rather than intentionally documenting ‘reality’ (although to me reality is feeling and sensation so I’m still grappling with that one…
Anyway…. the point is it’s more about story and sensation than it is about trying to capture a cold hard ‘fact’ (whatever that is…)
To tell the story I flattened out the ponies, they look ‘unreal’ because I’ve pulled the detail a little to give the whole thing a painterly effect without adding much texture…some texture was added on the grass and around the ponies to accentuate the light as it fell and shadows fell deeper and darker on the trees around me as the sun got lower and lower….
Pictorialism often has a soft focus and blur, to create that pictorialistic effect…these images were sharp… I used a range of techniques to both flatten out the detail in the ponies particularly and then create the soft effect…
Moments of awe like this at the spectacular beauty of nature are so good for the soul…so beautiful.
If you’re not sure what it is…. The belt of Venus is the most beautiful atmospheric phenomena that happens just above the horizon either shortly before or after sunset….it gives the sky the Pinky purple band causes by scattering of sunlight and the Earth’s shadow… The pink glow being the backscatter of reddy orange light. It’s always on the opposite horizon to the one that’s setting!
