The Moon, Lightning, and Other Special Effects: Skyscapes Part 3

"Moonlight on Dunes", digital art by J.D.

The full moon is a welcome sight for most of us, despite its ancient reputation for bringing out werewolves, madmen, and other odd phenomena. Certainly this year has given us some interesting full moons. If you are a moon watcher, you know that the moon has phases. Many calendars show those phases. sometimes we don't see the moon at all. This is the "dark of the moon", shown as a black circle on the calendar and called "New moon". The changes to the moon take place on its right side.  First a thin line of light appears along that side, gradually becoming a bright crescent, while the rest of the moon remains dark. This is sometimes called "first crescent". The crescent continues to grow, a process called a waxing moon.  You may have seen pictures in children's books that show a crescent moon with a man's face drawn inside the curve of the crescent. J.J. happened to catch the moon at a time that may explain why people have seen this particular appearance of the "Man in the Moon". 

Crescent moon

More and more of the moon's surface becomes revealed, until we see a half moon.  Craters and other features of the moon's surface become prominent. By the time the side of the moon facing us is displayed as a full moon, the markings on the moon's surface are even more distinct, leading to a new version of the "Man in the Moon".

Full moon

But the full moon doesn't last long.  Darkness begins to cover the moon's surface, again from the right.  Soon there is just another crescent, facing the opposite direction. This is sometimes called "last crescent". The darkening process is called a waning moon. (The terms "waxing" and "waning" are important if you hope to photograph the moon. To see the moon in conjunction with sunrise or during the early morning, it is best done when the moon is waxing. A waning moon sometimes produces a vision of the moon in late afternoon or at sunset.)  J.D. captured this one in late afternoon. Eventually the moon disappears into darkness again.

The best time to photograph the moon is during the "blue hours"  before dawn and after sunset. Get to your spot — well away from the reflections from city lights — early in both cases. As you wait for the sun to go down, you may catch the moon and sun in the same photograph. If you are patient in the early morning, you may get the moon and the rising sun in the same exposure.

Here is a picture J.J. got of a ring around the moon.








Moonlight, especially from a full moon, is more powerful than you might imagine. We had one full moon this spring that was almost bright enough to read by. To get a good photograph, stand with your back to the moon and allow your eyes to adjust to the light. Make the most of features that are in varying degrees of shadow. Use a tripod to keep the camera steady and a remote shutter release. Bracket your shots with both longer and shorter exposures to get the most interesting effects.

Moonlight in the Garden, photo by J.J.

Lightning, public domain photo

Lightning is extremely dramatic, but also extremely dangerous.  If you are going to attempt pictures like these, be sure you are well-protected. And it isn't necessary to have a close encounter with lightning to see it in its many forms. It hardly ever just forms a zigzag like the ones you see in cartoons or on logos. If you are thinking about adding lightning to a picture you are making or a logo you are designing, I suggest checking first with the National Weather Service online. They have good photos and often videos of storms. Then check public domain photos of lightning. There are literally hundreds of them out there! Lightning is most dramatic when it has many branches, when it does unexpected things, and when it illuminates an interesting object or scene on the ground.

If you live at the right latitudes to see either the Aurora Borealis or the Aurora Australis — or plan to travel to these regions — you can be treated to some outstanding sky displays. The luminous curtains, swirls, and bands are caused by atoms in the atmosphere that have been excited by emissions of electrons along the planet's magnetic field lines. Since the North Magnetic Pole is rapidly changing position at this time, this may be a very good year for auroras.  I suggest using a large clipboard or lap-desk with a clamp-on high-intensity battery-powered light,  and dark-colored construction paper and chalk pastels to capture images of the lights. The sides of the chalk can capture the movement of the "curtains" of light, while the points can put in finer details. I know I talk a lot about sketching, but the details of images fade quickly and are best caught in a form that will later stimulate memories.  Put in some sort of detail in the low foreground — mountains, trees, a city profile, etc. — to show the vastness of the display. A lighted tent, tepee, or igloo can be a nice touch.  And finger-less gloves are a hand-saver.

Aurora sketches by Annake

Man-made displays can also be interesting. Here are a couple of photos of fireworks. See what a difference shutter speed can make!

Fireworks!

Geese in flight (public domain photo)

There are many reasons to watch the sky for interesting occurrences. We have both bald eagles and golden eagles in our area and can often see them riding thermal up-drafts. There are ospreys on some of the larger lakes on Grand Mesa, where it is possible to watch them fishing, nest-building, and raising their families. We are fortunate to be underneath the flyway for migrating sandhill cranes and to have one of their regular rest-stops during migration within easy driving distance. Ducks and geese follow similar migratory pathways.

There is no shortage of man-made objects flying through the skies as well: airplanes, seaplanes, helicopters, crop-dusters, fire-fighting equipment, etc. There are scientific devices like weather balloons. There are also recreational vehicles like gliders, para-sails, hang-gliders, parachutes, zip-lines and drones. Any of these has the potential for making an interesting or exciting picture.

Things you might see if you look up...

Here is a colorful photo of hot-air balloons just beginning to rise into the air.


So I encourage you to keep your eyes on the skies. You never know when you will be in just the right place at just the right time.

Baby elephant in the clouds, photo by J.J.

This is the last in our series on Skyscapes. We hope you have enjoyed them and have even gotten some useful ideas from them. If you have ideas for future articles like these, please let us know and we will try to oblige. You can reach us at:

annakes_garden@yahoo.com or annakesgnome@gmail.com

Have a wonderful summer.

All photos public domain unless otherwise credited.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sunrises, Sunsets, and Rainbows: Skyscapes, Part 2

Watercolor and pencil sketch of  a sunrise by Annake

Sunrises are rewards for those of us who rise in the dark, eager to see what the day will bring. Because you have only about 20 minutes, start to finish, to capture a sunrise or sunset, it is probably best to work from a series of photographs taken at short intervals.  If you are sketching, I find it best to get the shaded areas done with their proper weights (values) and to write the names of specific colors or color combinations in the appropriate areas, to be filled in later. If you are going to try to capture the colors, believe it or not, a large box of children's' crayons may be your best tools. You can outline the major areas with pencil and scribble in enough color to match and blend together when you work on an advanced version of your sketch.

Sunrise at the Shore, photo by J.J.

Here is a simple sunrise scene that could have been taken almost anywhere. You may want to time yourself to see how quickly you can sketch it in crayon, pencil, or pastels.

Stormy sunrise photo by J.J.

Often our sunrises are paler and less intense than our sunsets, but once in a while we get a vivid, blood-red sunrise that brings to mind the old rhyme: "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors' delight." Sunrises often defy the ‘rule’ that clouds are always darker on the bottom. Because the source of light is below the horizon and is growing more intense by the moment, clouds are sometimes brighter at the bottom than they are at the top.

Sunrise on the Lake

Even after the sun has cleared the horizon, you have a short period of time to capture and record its effect on both the lower and the upper sky. Do NOT look directly at the sun at any time while you are doing this.  Choose your center of interest beforehand so that you can get the emphasis you want in your photograph or quick sketch. Give your center of interest the detail and prominence it deserves. This photograph shows a scene soon after the sunrise has faded.

Sunrise with deer, from Annake's sketchbook

One morning I was describing a sunrise in my journal as the colors changed. Suddenly I realized that I was not alone. A doe, last-year's fawn, was standing at the curb, staring intently at the same patch of sky that I was watching. The colors had faded to a pale saffron and a range of blues  Abruptly a thin arc of brilliant white appeared above the mesa. Within a few minutes it would be a great glowing disk, too bright to look at. Satisfied that our world was working properly, the doe and I turned away — she to munch on our infant lawn and I to write my impressions, make a simple sketch — and put her in it.

Rainbow

If you didn't know what causes a rainbow, you might easily feel that it was something magical and make up a story to explain it. People around the world made up myths and legends to explain rainbows. The most common one was that the rainbow is a bridge between Heaven and Earth, used by gods, their messengers, the ancestors of of the world's peoples, and/or for kings, pharaohs, heroes who died in battle, or people who ad lived exemplary lives to get to Heaven. Another idea was that the rainbow was actually a bow, usually in the hand of the god of thunder, to shoot arrows of lightning at the Earth.


A rainbow occurs when a thin layer of water droplets appears opposite the sun. This is usually just after a rainstorm passes by. Sunlight is made up of many wavelengths of colored light. As the rays of light are absorbed by the water drops, which are denser than the air, the light slows down and is bent at an angle. When the light leaves the water droplet, re-entering the air, it is bent again and speeds up. The bending of the light causes it to separate into its color components. When this happens in a collection of droplets, the result is a rainbow.

Double rainbow photo by J.J.

A rainbow is actually a complete circle, not just an arc. The entire circle can sometimes be seen and photographed from an airplane flying at fairly low altitudes. From the ground we only see an arc. So, sorry, there is no "end of the rainbow" — with or without a pot of gold. In order to see the rainbow, you need to have the sun behind you and no clouds nearby on the other side of the rainbow. The longest wavelengths of light are red; the shortest, violet. The red rays are bent the most and appear at the top and sides of the first layer of the rainbow. The violet rays are bent the least and appear at the bottom of the inside of the rainbow's arch. In between the two are the wavelengths of orange, yellow, green and blue. Occasionally there is a double rainbow. The second one is much fainter than the first and the colors are seen in the reverse order (violet on top, red on the bottom).

From Annake's sketchbook

When you want to capture a rainbow on paper, you will have to be even quicker than when sketching sunrises. I recommend this order: first, place the curve of the rainbow and its position on your sketch; then rough in the rainbow’s colors. Next, suggest the color of the sky surrounding the rainbow. Leave any foreground objects for last — they will be there long after the rainbow has faded and the sky clears. Remember that this is a sketch, meant to aid your memory, not a finished work — try to catch the elements of what made the scene memorable in the first place.

Sunset photo by J.J.

Sunset colors are often so brilliant that they seem unreal. Tropical sunsets can be especially vivid, You may want to lighten such colors in your composition and show the effect of the colors on objects in the foreground in order to make them seem more realistic. On the other hand, if you prefer the very brilliant colors anything in the foreground should be limited to strong silhouetted forms with very little color detail. Of course there are gradations between the two techniques, depending on the angle between the foreground and the sunset sky.

Winter sunset photo by J.J.

If you are taking photographs, I suggest you turn around and and  capture the sky in the east, directly opposite the sunset. You may find it better suits your purpose. The objects in the foreground are well-lit and not silhouetted. You can replicate the sunset sky in pastel colors and still show colors reflected on objects on the ground. This photograph shows the effect of light from a winter sunset on the ground in front of it. The sun is very low in the sky.



If you have the time to do so, take photographs or make quick sketches of the sunset scene on three or four consecutive days. Skies are seldom the same. Be sure you are positioned in the same spot each time. You should see quite a few differences, depending on the atmospheric conditions, which affect the quality of the light, and the time of year, which dictates the angle at which sunlight strikes the earth. Compare the scenes. Chose the ones you prefer and file or discard the others. Make at least one finished composition based on your choices. Combine elements from the different scenes if you like.

Panoramic sunset photo by J.J.

After the sunset you have a period of 20 to 30 minutes — depending on the terrain, weather, and time of year — to capture the lingering colors and their effects on the objects silhouetted. It is probably best if you don't begin until the sun has completely dropped below the horizon. Work with the reflection of the sun's colors on the clouds in the sky and what happens as they change. After-sunset skies are usually much more vivid than before-sunrise skies, particularly if there are thin clouds in the scene. Dust particles and smoke also produce rich reds and oranges. Notice the foreground as it darkens and gives you back-lit silhouettes. And don't forget to look over your shoulder to see what is happening in the east.

Watercolor sunset by Annake

Even if you don't photograph, draw, paint or embroider these beautiful aspects of Earth's technicolor light, please do pause to enjoy them.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creatures of Sea and Shore: Seascapes, Part V

Pelicans 3, photo by J.J.

Probably nothing increases the interest of a seascape design more than adding the image of a live sea creature to it. This may be something small like the seagull and fish I showed you in my tongue-in-cheek picture called "Seafood Surprise". It may even be as elementary as a few seabirds, each indicated by a vaguely V-shaped line. On the other hand, the animal may dominate the design, using the sea simply as background. Think of a hump-backed whale rising out of the water. In this issue, we will be featuring marine life in needle arts, art prints, and photographs, beginning with this photograph by J.J.  While these pelicans do not live in the sea, they certainly depend upon it for their survival. Their species has been sustaining itself this way for a very long time and their bodies have been modified to do so in the most efficient manner.

Tropical fish needlepoint by Annake

Fish, of course are the elemental sea creatures and come in a seemingly endless variety of shapes and colors.  The fish that live around coral reefs are especially colorful. Some, like seahorses and sea dragons, are so surprising and unlikely-looking that they seem to have been designed by Walt Disney! Others are so well camouflaged that you hardly notice them at all. If you would rather portray living animals than true seascapes, you can't go wrong with fish. They can carry a composition by themselves, with just a watery background to set the stage.

Colorful fish design for upcoming needle arts projects

Many fish are sleek and streamlined. These inspire me to do stylized and even semi-abstract designs.  This one made me think of doing a project in reverse applique because of its black over-all shape and vivid areas of color. I still intend to use the design in that way, but decided to sketch it on canvas and do it in continental stitch first. Sometime later I will cut the outline out of black felt and applique the colored areas from the back (a technique called reverse applique) vivid scraps of silk and satin. Then I will applique the whole construction onto a watery-looking fabric and frame it or make it into a pillow or wall hanging. Use these links to see a pair of these finished fish designs. [Links to the fighting fish and goldfish] We will show both styles of needlework in future posts.

Photo by J.J.

Fish are not easy to photograph in the water, but J.J. was patient and  "caught" this one lurking just under the surface.  It would be relatively easy to add one like it to either a saltwater scene or a lake shore composition.

It is easy to be interested in — and even concerned about — animals like dolphins and cuddly sea otters, but J.D. was adamant that I include some of the creatures who are far less like us, but just as interesting and beautiful in their own ways.  J.J. was able to creep up behind this little fellow while his stalked eyes were looking the other way.  Just look at the intricate construction of his body and the delicacy of his coloring. Isn't he wonderful?

Crab photo by J.J.

Sea turtle print by Annake

Here is a sketch of a sea turtle that I made long ago in the tropics and which we have made into a print. Sadly, all sea turtles are endangered now. I always thought of this one as a male, swimming through a bed of kelp and sea grass.
From the day they hatch, the males spend their entire lives at sea. The mature females travel huge distances and undergo great physical struggles to return to the beaches where they hatched and lay their eggs.

J.J. found this shy little octopus hiding in a very shallow tide pool, waiting patiently for the next tide. They can remain out of water for a surprisingly long time and even travel over land for short distances. They are very intelligent and can solve puzzles. As anyone who has tried to keep one in an aquarium can tell you, they are "escape artists" who make Harry Houdini look like an amateur!

Octopus photo by J.J.

Sea Otter

Now let's look at some of those warm-blooded sea mammals that we respond to more readily. Here are three who spend most of their time in the ocean, but come on shore occasionally to rest or to deliver and care for their babies. Who doesn't like a cuddly-looking sea otter?

Galapagos Sea Lions

This is a mother sea lion with her pup. You can tell that they are not seals because they have small external ears, while seals do not.  I wanted to use this print to make a point about horizons. When a horizon is very low, as this one is, it makes any figure in front of it — whether person, animal, or rock — look larger and more imposing. In this picture, the sea, while important to the setting, can be very simple and understated. The sea lions have very streamlined bodies and are a good choice if you are just starting to draw animals for your compositions.  Or you can easily cut out their shapes from a photograph if you prefer.

Walrus

All right, so he was grumpy and probably didn't want to pose for his portrait. Not even animals in zoos or wildlife sanctuaries always enjoy close attention from we strange two-legged creatures who want to sketch or photograph them.  Fortunately a good long lens allows one to get a good image without getting too close to the grumpy ones. I think he shows a lot of character, impressive teeth (the Inuit call walruses "tooth-walkers" because they use their tusks to haul themselves out of the water and up steep slopes), and a really great mustache!

We hope you have enjoyed this post as much as we three enjoyed putting it together for you.

This is the last article in the Seascape series, at least for now. We may ‘re-visit’ it from time to time. Look for an article on Skyscapes sometime in May.

J.D., J.J., and

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All the World's a Stage: Another Look at Landscapes

Near sunset in western Colorado (35mm SLR photo)

Jim Richardson,  National Geographic photographer, urges photographers to think of landscape photographs they are about to shoot as if they were settings for plays.* That set me to thinking of broader applications for that principle:  I wanted to apply it to pictures we already have.


Do you have photographs or sketches of landscapes that are accurate, but that just aren't ‘special’? Too good to throw away, not good enough to frame?  Perhaps you have a collection of picture postcards from past trips stored in a box somewhere. I certainly have all of those. I got out a few while I thought about what to say in this post.

I took the picture above late in the day, looking westward.  The color is accurate, I did not use a colored filter. I have always liked the picture, but had never decided what to do with it. It seemed a good place to start the current experiment.  Because I wanted to try several scenarios with my picture, I made a couple of copies before I moved to the next step.  J.D. took one for his own use. We decided to each do the project, but separately, choosing our own themes. J.D. will chime in with comments on his own results as we go along.

Camel, photo by J.J.

Much of western Colorado, where our picture was taken, is semi-desert. It is not a sand desert, but dry grassland with some rocky areas. The picture certainly said desert to me. I determined it would be the backdrop for a desert scenario. And what more appropriate desert animal than a camel?

“But a camel in western Colorado?”, you scoff. Well, truth is often stranger than fiction. In 1855, Jefferson Davis (remember him from the Civil War?) was the Secretary of the U.S. War Department. He spent $10,000 to import camels to carry supplies and mail between remote western military posts. The endeavor worked well but was broken up by the Civil War, when most of the animals were auctioned off, killed, or escaped.  At least one became the source of a legend,  said to be 30 feet tall, to eat grizzly bears, and to vanish when in plain view. (Look up “camels in the Western U.S.”, and also look for a Smithsonian article on the Legend of the Red Ghost — great reading!)  I decided to do a detailed color drawing on watercolor paper to depict the Legend of the Red Ghost. One story was that the camel carried a macabre burden — a skeleton wrapped in canvas, strapped and roped to the camel's back.

The image was drawn in colored pencil, graphite and charcoal. I sprayed it with fixative (hair spray will do, but practice first to get distances and amounts of spray correct; it is better to do this outside on a warm, calm day). I cut the figure out carefully with small, very sharp scissors and put it in place on the photograph. I used sketches, but you might prefer to use other photographs.

Legend of the Red Ghost paste-up by Annake

J.D.:  Over the winter holidays, I began to learn to use a much more powerful image editing program in order to meet the increasing technical demands of the work at Annake’s Garden; so, when Annake proposed this exercise, I decided it was a good time to see how far I’d learned to push the boundaries of what I could do with digital images. First I turned the picture upside down and backwards – and got an image that looked a lot like the sea at a sandy beach, about as far from a desert scene as you can get. Being an ornery and contrary sort of creature, I figured I would see how many element of this image I could turn into their opposites.

"Moonlight on Dunes," digital graphic by J.D.

Without getting into the specifics of how I used the software, this is what I did: turned sky into water and sand, mostly by stretching the image horizontally and squashing it vertically; turned the ground into night sky by pasting in a strip of the same almost-black color, then sprinkling in some fake stars; turned the sun into a reflection of the moon by laying a mostly transparent image from a different source over it, then adding a little glare effect at the right edge to suggest an out-of-frame moon rising. Everything else was just fine tuning the intensity of the colors, contrast, and sharpness to give the impression of a photograph taken at night.

This all may sound like mysterious high-tech digital wizardry, but there is nothing here that can’t also be done in an analog photographer’s darkroom (although it might take considerably more time and expense!)

ANNAKE: Now suppose you had a copy of the photograph we worked on. What would you do with it? Ask yourself some questions:

• Do I need to turn the photo upside down? Change a horizontal picture to a vertical one or the reverse? Crop the photo (cut off parts of it)? Cover up or take out something? Change my perspective (point of view)?
• What kind of story would I like this landscape to tell? Adventure? Romance? History? Mystery? Fantasy? Science fiction (remember J.D.'s "Early Morning Frost...” on Mars)? Horror? Comedy? Tragedy? Natural history?

Once you have decided what kind of story you want to tell, ask yourself if the picture you are considering can help you tell that kind of story. If the answer is "Yes", then ask yourself how the picture can help.

• Does it suggest a particular place? A particular period of time?
• What sort of people might live here or have lived here in the past?
• Is it the habitat of a particular animal? Alive or extinct? Real or mythical?
• What interesting objects might have come to rest here? Is it an extraterrestrial place? In the sky? Under the ground?

Cliff face (rock wall**)

Each decision will clarify your story in your mind. You will begin to ‘flesh out’ your narrative. Then decide what scenery, props, and cast members you need to introduce into the photo to make your story come to life. You might have a picture of a steep rock wall.  Are you going to show a family of mountain goats descending the wall? Climbers free-climbing or ascending on ropes? A hang-glider swooping away from it? A helicopter hovering in front of it? Choose your characters and props carefully.




Now, how are you going to get your props and characters onstage?

• Are you going to cut parts out of other photographs and glue them to your background?
• Are you going to stand the background up and place cutouts or small model figures in front of it? Make a diorama out of it?
• Are you going to glue or paint your characters and/or props on a clear plastic overlay?

Another 35mm photo by Annake

This photograph is also one of mine and was done with no color filters.  Not desert this time, but certainly dry grassland and open woodland. There's no mystery involved this time. It is a simple natural history scene that could easily have happened.  J. D. asked for a big raptor alighting on the pile of branches, and that is exactly what I gave him.

The hawk was done in the same way as the camel and applied to the photograph. It is a kind of hawk known to make its nest of sticks. The picture was cropped to take out "clutter".

Desert hawk paste-up by Annake

J.D.:  Since Annake used my best idea for this photo, I struggled to come up with anything else interesting. In the end, I just squashed the perspective enough so that I could create sufficient foreground to put in some stock creepy elements. The skull and spider are cut-&-paste from public domain photos available online, and the burrow with glowing red eyes under the pile of sticks is pretty much the same set of effects I used for the night sky in the beach scene above. I don’t really have a story for this image, but if it inspires one for you drop us a line and let us know.

J.D.'s silly/spooky landscape

ANNAKE: This post is the result of my musings. It is not just for those of us who paint landscapes, photograph them, or portray them in needle arts.  It is for those who have photos, slides, or sketches they have always meant to organize and "do something" with, for those who collect picture postcards, and for those who just like to make something new out of something old that might otherwise be discarded. (If I missed anyone, it probably applies to you, too.) Have fun! 

*From a lecture for The Great Courses Masters of Photography, copyright 2014 The Teaching Company

**So, Annake tells me she needs a picture of a rock wall; I downloaded this nice public domain photo. Then I find out she meant a cliff face...

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