Forces of Nature
Toby thought this picture looked a bit odd. Too much photoshoppy was his critical assessment. He said I should go back to the drawing board and start over again.
I told him that I had processed this photo about 10 different times and this was just about unchanged from the original RAW file from the camera except for some color reduction and a little bit of contrast.
‘Well, it doesn’t look right,’ he said. ‘Where’s that man that’s supposed to be in the moon? Why does it look like I’m looking at Jupiter through the clouds of Ganymede?’
I said I was impressed that he knew that Ganymede was a moon of Jupiter but that it has a very thin atmosphere and wouldn’t make clouds like this. I told him that Titan has a thick atmosphere with clouds and even lightning but it orbits Saturn, not Jupiter.
‘Oh, I don’t like lightning,’ he exclaimed! ‘Thor gets angry and bad things happen.’ Continuing on though, he asked, ‘If it’s not the moon and it’s not Jupiter then what is it?’
When told him it was a picture of the sun on a foggy morning, he scoffed. ‘You can’t look at the sun and it doesn’t have those bands in it. You are just making this up!’
I told him that when I took the picture, the fog was thick with clouds above and the sun was just starting to burn through. A couple of minutes earlier and the sun wouldn’t have been visible and a couple of minutes later and the fog would have been gone and the sun really would have been too bright to look at. That’s why I didn’t end up doing much processing as nature had already made a splendid picture.
Toby wandered off grumbling that with all of that zippity-do-dah nature stuff I was spouting that he hoped I wasn’t going to try to get him to buy New Age Crystals or make him eat organic dog food…
A1, SEL100400GM, f/5.6, 1/2500sec, 382mm, iso100
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