I always tend to wonder what the Earth must have seen in its 4 billion years as it goes about the cosmos. Then, of course, I think about all of us on this planet and it just spirals out of control from there. Often, after going about that thought spiral - hours have passed and what I was doing has now changed, or grown cold from neglect. Eventually, trying to recollect lost time, I always depart this meandering of the mind with a lingering thought of my prior exploits.
These panels basically embody that, with or without the sappy story. I was hoping to convey a larger time expanse than I ultimately ended up with. However, I thought about this at great length (and yes, even went off into day dreaming as aforementioned) and came to the conclusion that the sun setting, to the exposition of the stars was an apt metaphor. The first panel is the sun, being generally concomitant to productivity, setting and showing the departure from a functional task. The inner panels are the transition between the two states. The center panel actually contains the last remnants of a lens flare from the sun, but also the first hints of the night from the last panel. In the last panel, the Milky Way cloud can be seen. In a cheesy way, this is signifying what dreams are made of and the emergence of this iconic period of our days...and all that poetic jazz. In the beginning, I thought this was just a neat idea. In the end, it still is a neat idea...just a lot more metaphor attached to it post hoc.
Now, the technical aspects. This image is a combination of over 30 images. The images of the valley were taken atop South Mountain at the end of Summit Rd from 5pm - 7pm. I set the tripod and used vertical orientation to shoot the panorama to minimize visual distortions. The last panel contains two separate images of space. One was taken at Needles Vista, at 1am, using an equatorial mount and drive to minimize motion blur from Earth's rotation. The second was taken from the Carlsbad Caverns, NM, entrance at roughly 11pm. The two space images were then combined to create a composite of a close-to-actual view of the Milky Way seen above Phoenix...if one could see the Milky Way above Phoenix. In all, I collected over 450 images to create this piece.
The first four panels are all HDR creations with 5 bracketed photos each using f-stop 3.5, ISO 200 (Simulated), Focal 27mm/18mm, fastest shutter speed: 1/8000, slowest: 1". Once I had the five images for each panel, I constructed the HDR image using the same base numbers for each variable and then tweaked for time of day changes. The first panel contains no edits, and only minor color correction after the HDR process. The second panel contains color/light bleeding from the first panel. The third panel contains minor amounts of the same bleeding. The fourth panel contains light bleeding from the fifth panel, in nearly the same ratio as the second panel to the first. The fifth panel was comprised of an HDR image and the composite shot of space. I decided to edit this last panel to show what one could see if there was no smog, or light pollution. It gives a bit of fantasy to this image, but it doesn't depart from reality...just ignores a few finer points of our cities polluted reality.
