Work Record 2

Plan:

In this shoot my focus was to attempt to photograph the moon and develop my night photography, with the intent to create an ambiguous image as we don't know much about things beyond the sky and objects like the moon are misunderstood due to very few people having information about one of the key components of our natural world.

Research: 

Many photographer have literally photographed the moon however I wanted to incorporate the idea of anonymity ambiguity behind the subject.  For this shoot i wanted to focus on the scientific element of Astro photography as well as the aspect of connotations behind images. This approach was taken after conducting research into " Nasa's Scientific Visualization Studio/science".   The images depicted an anatomically correct of he moon. This inspired me to conduct my shoot to base it on science and hopefully as a result of variation i will achieve some individually unique images.

AO2: Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops.

  
Camera Settings:

I was shooting the images in the raw format so I could obtain as much detail as possible, as I knew night photography is difficult i would need the detail so that i can further manipulate the images heavily in Photoshop. 
The images where on a slightly longer exposure so i could capture the full detail of the moon, however as a result of this the images in some cases became overexposed therefore I reduced it so that the images wouldn't blow out.
I tired to frame the moon in a way that would imply some connotations. This is why in some of the images where the moon wasn't central I positioned it in the corner that implies longing gaze. This is due to the large empty space acting like a direction of line of sight. This could give the image purpose instead of just being a scientific image. Additionally by changing the position on the moon I wanted to use that as a way to explore its ambiguity. 
This related to my plan and research that suggest that although it is such a familiar object it appears every day and travels trough the sky, but many people still have very little knowledge about the moon and its purpose in the world.

AO3: Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress.

I decided that as it was just a single object it lacked creativity and the artistic feel I was going for.   Therefore this could be improved by performing a complex edit in order to bring life to the composition and the overall image. 
 I put the on the of the images into photo-shop and begun by creating 2 layers of curves to burn and dodge detail into. as well as this i created a separate layer identical to he background, lowered the opacity and use a colour filter to change the hue of the image. this allowed a deep blue to glow from the back giving the emptiness of the of the monotone bnw composition some colour.  
After this i decided to manipulate various brushes in the photo-shop program and use them to create a surreal galaxy style scene with the moon central in the composition. 
The finally image gave a surreal yet realistic juxtaposition to the piece with the both real images of galaxies and the moon but the artistic more abstract idea of them existing together in a single image.

AO4

These are my best edited images from this shoot.