Emirates Photography Club: Supermoon Meetup

ISO100, f11, 1sec; Lightroom: reduced exposure 2 stops, applied graduated filter with
increased exposure to bottom half to bring out beach and water.

Yesterday evening I took the long drive out to the Palm Jumeirah to take part in an event organized by the Emirates Photography Club.  About one hundred shooters showed up to capture the full moon, including a few guys with mammoth lenses.  I was able to borrow an 80-300mm lens from a colleague. While it wasn't of much use shooting the moon, it did help in capturing the Burj Al Arab.  Unfortunately, the spot chosen for this even produced a rather undramatic background.  Still, it was good to meet new enthusiasts and to take the challenge of shooting the moon.

Review: Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 4: Landscape in Photography, 1997

Clarke sees two major strands in the history of landscape photography, one on either side of the Atlantic.  Across both, photographers were agents of viewing, the privileged few who went out into the world and brought back images from their journeys.  

In England, they were tourists, wandering about the countryside composing the equivalent of picture postcards.  Their images were highly idealized versions of a rural utopia.  Clarke cites Roger Fenton’s work as typical of the picturesque, a genre reflecting “the leisurely assumptions of a class of people who looked upon landscape scenery in aesthetic and philosophical terms.”    That is, they didn’t live there and weren’t terribly concerned with the reality of those who did.  Their version of the English countryside was a “highly edited version … – exclusive and bound by mythology.”  Clarke doesn’t bother to explain why this might have been so.  In his introduction to the chapter he remarks on how the photograph emerged at a time when painters were interested in realism and when science was making quick advances in understanding the processes of the natural world.  Why, then, this regressive trend in landscape photography? 

Review: Ragnar Axelsson and Last Days of the Arctic

British Airways boasts over 100 hours of on-demand television programs and movies.  Even so, on this week’s Dubai-London-Atlanta flights there wasn’t much on offer.  In fact the only thing worth watching was a one hour documentary on the people of the Arctic as seen through the work of news photographer Ragnar Axelsson.