In Heaven and on Earth
Hi there, this is another photo unearthed from the Rosolina archive (see the album Rosolina sunrise), dating from June 2016. It was one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen - a couple of hours after a long, raging thunderstorm had ended; you can see the remains of the turmoil in the sky, and distant flocks of clouds wandering just over the horizon. The photos in the album cited above tell many detail about the place and the situation.
I picked this photo up because the earth and the heavens looked so deeply intertwined. I am thoroughly sensitive to this fascinating concept. In the past, before the Scientific revolution, people believed that the Earth and the heavens were utterly distinct - even made of fundamentally different substances. The Earth was fraught with imperfection, decay, death. Sin. The heavens, on the other distant side, were eternal and perfect - actually, made of a fundamentally different substance, the quintessence. This worldview derived from the cosmological system of Ptolemy, which derived from Aristotle’s physics, which derived from… Well, what really matters here is that in the Medieval period this cosmological system was further developed by many theologicians and the Ptolemaic system became the official worldview of the Catholic church. The parable starting with Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo up to Newton turned everything around. The crowning achievement was Newton’s universal gravitation law, which demonstrably applied in heaven and on earth. Our world were no more a place of penitence, set apart from God’s perfection: we were an integral part of the universe - although, sadly, we were not in a better condition than before but, rather, the rest of the universe was “downgraded” to our own status. I often think about how deeply shocking this breakthrough would have been: one of the most incredible revolutionary concepts, maybe the single most important one: realising that we are in a fundamental way part of the texture of the whole universe. After all, the cells of our body are made of the remains of ancient dead stars...
Well, as I was saying, this picture conveyed to me the feeling of a deep unity of the whole universe - from the most fleeting subatomic particle which just now is passing (unnoticed) through my body up to galaxies and galaxy clusters and... So I thought that this bracketing, although being sadly flawed in its exposure (some highlights were blown up even in the underexposed shot), might be worthy a try. Luckily the magic of Darktable and the blending of luminosity masks allowed me to get a decent result.
I have obtained this picture by blending an exposure bracketing [-1.7/0/+1.7 EV] by luminosity masks in the Gimp (EXIF data, as usual, refer to the "normal exposure" shot), then I added some final touches with Nik Color Efex Pro 4. RAW files processed with Darktable.
No Orton or similar effects; just the inverted RGB blue channel technique described by Boris Hajdukovic as a final contribution to the processing of some parts of the photo. While this technique (which, its imposing name notwithstanding, is pretty simple to implement) often holds interesting results in full daylight landscapes, its effects on a low-light capture (e.g. a sunrise) are utterly unpredictable, so at the end of my workflow I often give it a try to ascertain its possibilities.
In Heaven and on Earth
Hi there, this is another photo unearthed from the Rosolina archive (see the album Rosolina sunrise), dating from June 2016. It was one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen - a couple of hours after a long, raging thunderstorm had ended; you can see the remains of the turmoil in the sky, and distant flocks of clouds wandering just over the horizon. The photos in the album cited above tell many detail about the place and the situation.
I picked this photo up because the earth and the heavens looked so deeply intertwined. I am thoroughly sensitive to this fascinating concept. In the past, before the Scientific revolution, people believed that the Earth and the heavens were utterly distinct - even made of fundamentally different substances. The Earth was fraught with imperfection, decay, death. Sin. The heavens, on the other distant side, were eternal and perfect - actually, made of a fundamentally different substance, the quintessence. This worldview derived from the cosmological system of Ptolemy, which derived from Aristotle’s physics, which derived from… Well, what really matters here is that in the Medieval period this cosmological system was further developed by many theologicians and the Ptolemaic system became the official worldview of the Catholic church. The parable starting with Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo up to Newton turned everything around. The crowning achievement was Newton’s universal gravitation law, which demonstrably applied in heaven and on earth. Our world were no more a place of penitence, set apart from God’s perfection: we were an integral part of the universe - although, sadly, we were not in a better condition than before but, rather, the rest of the universe was “downgraded” to our own status. I often think about how deeply shocking this breakthrough would have been: one of the most incredible revolutionary concepts, maybe the single most important one: realising that we are in a fundamental way part of the texture of the whole universe. After all, the cells of our body are made of the remains of ancient dead stars...
Well, as I was saying, this picture conveyed to me the feeling of a deep unity of the whole universe - from the most fleeting subatomic particle which just now is passing (unnoticed) through my body up to galaxies and galaxy clusters and... So I thought that this bracketing, although being sadly flawed in its exposure (some highlights were blown up even in the underexposed shot), might be worthy a try. Luckily the magic of Darktable and the blending of luminosity masks allowed me to get a decent result.
I have obtained this picture by blending an exposure bracketing [-1.7/0/+1.7 EV] by luminosity masks in the Gimp (EXIF data, as usual, refer to the "normal exposure" shot), then I added some final touches with Nik Color Efex Pro 4. RAW files processed with Darktable.
No Orton or similar effects; just the inverted RGB blue channel technique described by Boris Hajdukovic as a final contribution to the processing of some parts of the photo. While this technique (which, its imposing name notwithstanding, is pretty simple to implement) often holds interesting results in full daylight landscapes, its effects on a low-light capture (e.g. a sunrise) are utterly unpredictable, so at the end of my workflow I often give it a try to ascertain its possibilities.