Pixel Abuse

What happened was, I went down to the dock in the dark, and took pictures that no phone-cam should ever be asked to take. You might be amused.

I was with my ten-year-old daughter; The sky was black but the moon was full, its shadows knife-edged, first moonshadows she’d ever seen. Its light, edging round the slope of our island, looked cool, only I didn’t have a “real” camera, just my Google Pixel. Hmm, I sense a challenge.

Here’s the unimproved all-the-defaults version, which has a bit of primitive poetry perhaps.

So for the first time I got serious with the manual controls on the Lightroom camera app; cranked the ISO up and the shutter speed down, held the phone against one of the dock pilings, and growled at the girl to stop bouncing.

Then I went inside and brought the heavy photo-edits.

Up in the top left, in the sky? Those are stars! And if you enlarge it, angled striations in the black on the right side? Moonbeams!

It’s not actually, you know, a Good Picture. But exploring boundaries is fun, and they’re a little further out than I’d have thought.

Before I went up I shot the path of moon-reflections on the ocean. Which was, relatively, easy.

I asked Lauren “Isn’t there a word for the path of the moon (or sun) in the water?” She poked around and came up with “moonglade” which has however been taken over by World of Warcraft. Someone once asked a German-speaker, who answered Mondstrahlbleichfolgenimmerwandererufer, but they may have been improvising.

I keep saying: Golden age of Photography, we’re in it.

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