Reality check

The electromagnetic spectrum of energy ranges from infinitely short energy waves to infinitely long energy waves traveling at about 186,000 miles per second. There is a very small slice of energy in the center of this spectrum that we call visible light. It is what our eyes and brain can detect. A camera and film detects even less than the human eye – about half.

All that to say that this scene of the sunrise at Cana Island in Door county, Wisconsin is impossible to photograph without stretching the capability of the film to record the various tones. The above photo was created by combining three separate photos into one. The upper half was metered for the sky and the lower half was metered for the foreground and middleground details. The difference between the two readings was too great for the film to record in one shot.

These photos were combined in a computer photo editing program (PhotoShop). A third photograph supplied the lantern in the light tower, which was cloned, resized, adjusted to match the tones of the new photo, then pasted into the final product.

So three separate views of reality had to be combined to create what really was reality based on what my eye could see, as opposed to what the camera could not, even though my eyes could only detect a small slice of the larger reality.

Makes my head hurt thinking about it.

Click on photo to enlarge. © 2005 James Jordan.