2016—Refrigerator Magnet

After my initial excitement over photographing the Milky Way at 10,000 plus feet last week, I discovered that the photographs I took that evening in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest were not quite as good as I thought they were.  The shortcomings of the photos were revealed when I printed them in a printing workshop conducted by Moose Peterson in Mammoth Lakes, a few days after I took them.  Printing the Milky Way shots at 24 X 30 inches (the gold standard for a photographer’s prints)  revealed myriad major problems with my photos.  As it turns out, while they don’t look too bad on an iPhone or computer screen, every bit of noise caused by incorrect camera settings and every out of focus star caused by my carelessness at focusing the lens (darkness is no excuse) leapt off the page.  The workshop was an eye opening experience for me.  I discovered it is crucial to get the photograph correctly exposed and composed in camera.  Photoshop can repair only so much and some Photoshop adjustments cause the photographs to break and fall apart.  Printing a photograph on such a large scale shows whether the photograph was a good one to begin with.  While I did manage to get a couple of photographs right during the Printing Workshop, and those printed beautifully at 24X30 inches, none of my Milky Way shots made the cut.  They had such potential in my mind but instead, they are more suited to be refrigerator magnets.