Moon Drops

Moon Drops. Practice: The World Reimagined, Category: Nature, Type: Composite

Your Eyes: What Do You See?

• What’s the very first thing that grabs your attention in Moon Drops, and where does your eye travel next?

• Does your sense of scale shift as you spend time looking at the artwork?

• Do you experience the scene as discovered or constructed?

• Are you seeing many independent objects or one impossible arrangement?

• Does this scene feel believable)?

• If Moon Drops were the opening scene of a movie, what genre(s) would you expect it to be?

• If you didn’t know the title of this artwork, what would you call it?
  
  Please share your insights.

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My Eye: Behind the Image

What I Saw and How The Artwork Came Together

The photographs that comprise Moon Drops were captured under, and inspired by, a full moon. I was drawn to the way light danced off the ground vegetation along a retaining wall near my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The foliage in a six-inch section was still heavy with droplets from a gentle rain shower earlier that evening. It was a magical scene with all the elements for an intriguing composite image.

Many of my composites consist of images taken at different times (days, months, or even years apart) and often at distant locations. The vision for a piece often comes out of the blue or after perusing images in my “component bank.” In contrast, I shot all of the components for Moon Drops over the course of one hour and, even as I photographed the scene, I had a good sense of how they might fit together.

The bright moon and the shimmering drops made for a natural juxtaposition. The drops also created a strong “leading line” that guides the viewer’s eye. (Typically, a leading line takes your eye TO a subject. But in this surreal scene the drops can be a “bidirectional” bridge heading to or from the moon.

The finished artwork consists of eight photographs blended into a single cohesive artwork in Photoshop. All of the images, except for the moon, are “focus stacks.” Focus stacking involves taking a series of photos of the same subject, each with a slightly different focal point, then combining them on a computer. I use a program called Helicon Focus to create the flattened stacks. A sturdy tripod is mandatory for focus stacking, as the slightest shift will throw the whole stack out of whack. I was lucky that there was very little wind when I took the photos, so the foliage stayed in place.

Including the stacked photos, about 200 individual exposures went into the making of Moon Drops. The shroud around the moon is a macro shot of a deteriorating cobweb on the retaining wall. As a final touch, I applied a light blue–purple gradient to heighten the sense of enchantment and wonder.

Physical art
Moon Drops is printed on high-gloss aluminum. I chose the high-gloss surface to maximize the feel of the drops rolling off the page.

If you’re into gear…
Lenses for Moon Drops:
- Nikon Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8 (for the raindrops and foreground foliage)
- Nikon Micro-NIKKOR 200mm f/4 (for drilling deep into the foliage)
- Nikon 70–200mm f/4G (for the moon)

Camera:
Nikon D850

The Eye of the Machine

Here’s what ChatGPT when I asked for an explanation of Moon Drops:

Disparate elements presented as one moment:

• Impossible scale relationships

• Improbable juxtapositions

• A single path connecting it all

A whole that shouldn’t make sense — but it does.

Reflection

This echos in spirit what I often say to people when I talk about Moon Drops. But I do like the language and the way it framed the image in terms of a Gestalt, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

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