If you’ve been paying close attention to the obscure sections of the media, you might already know that today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. You know, Earth’s moon, Luna, that big grey thing in the sky, just to clarify. And I’m vaguely curious to know how much attention this gets in other countries; I imagine it’s at least a tad less in Russia, for instance. Nationality is a stupid thing, and while we might credit any accomplishment to the country where most of the participants hail from, major endeavors such as going to the moon were not only built upon the efforts and expertise of people around the world, they relied on the scientific accomplishments from all of previous history. This is a human milestone, pure and simple.
My own perspective hasn’t really changed from when I covered the 40th anniversary, so I’ll refer you back to that one – it’s got a picture and all. [I know, I’ve barely been posting anything recently and with a topical subject at hand, I’m chickening out and using an old post. But we already know I suck. And worse, I’m about to do an outside link too.]
But for a newer perspective – well, okay, no, it’s also fifty years old, but it might be as new, i.e., previously unknown, to you as it was to me – we go to the Astronomy Picture of the Day from a few days back, and a composite video of the Apollo 11 lunar lander’s descent. Overlaid is the communications between Aldrin and Armstrong in the lander itself, as well as ground control in Houston and all of their monitoring and concerns. The targeted area for landing turned out to be too dangerous, strewn with boulders and debris, and beyond it was a crater with uneven slopes, so Armstrong had to take over and manually drift the lander to the side to avoid these – with fuel running dangerously low. Now, I knew about their fuel reserves long ago, but it’s quite another matter to be watching it, realtime as it were, as the lander drifts towards a safe spot while the clock is ticking. There’s little for us to compare it to, because most of us aren’t even airborne – um, uh, spaceborne, vacuum-borne, aloft, whatever – when we do anything, but the lander had to set down precisely and gently, and even a rougher landing could mean that they wouldn’t be able to leave again.
You see, there weren’t a lot of options. The little engine in the base of the escape module (the upper stage of the lander, that would detach and carry them back to orbit to rendezvous with Collins in the command module) was fixed-thrust and non-gimbaled, meaning it couldn’t be aimed, so any corrective aiming had to be done with the reaction control system, those little nozzles around the module that you see in all of the photos, which also had limited fuel. Set down at too steep an angle, and while the escape module might leave the moon’s surface, it wouldn’t be able to adequately correct its path and make rendezvous. So, descent and landing had to be pretty kosher. As it was, they touched down so gently that they didn’t even compress the landing struts, those legs of the lander, and their egress to the moon required a bigger jump off the ladder than anticipated.
One more silly bit, because it’s actually an interesting aspect of physics. It’s easy to think that the lander wasn’t too hard to handle because of the lower lunar gravity, which is true insofar as descent acceleration went. However, even in microgravity, objects still have their mass, which has inertia, and inertia still has to be overcome. A very large or dense object can take a lot to move, stop, or change direction, so while it might take less fuel, it’s not like tossing around an empty crate. It might be likened to heavy objects on a slick sheet of ice – starting their movement, or stopping them, still takes considerable effort.
Anyway, enjoy the celebrations (he says in order to post this before the day’s over.)
Okay, one more stupid thing, which is a screenshot of the text file I use as backup when I’m writing posts (having been 
Meanwhile, in some select areas some numbers do hold true; the way molecules bond, for instance, which is responsible for much of the symmetry that we can find now. And in most cases, we find the patterns and geometry that they produce remarkable precisely because they are not the norm; snowflakes are cool, but they seem odd because nature doesn’t generally work that way, and I spot a lot of my photographic subjects because animal patterns are usually symmetrical among a background that’s not. We select some trees or plants as subjects because they’re not lopsided or straggly; we manicure our lawns and lay out our landscaping because nature rarely produces what we find attractive. And that’s fine, because if everything was ‘attractive,’ we’d have to have some other standard for something rare, exceptional, or unique. We like the little surprises, but they need that contrast to even be remarkable.
The main image above comes from just barely over nine years ago, taken July 3rd 2010 out over Jordan lake. I’d had some decent success getting 
The first part that I’ll talk about is perhaps the easiest, which is illustration. Just about every photographer ends up tackling such a thing at one time or another; some of us do it routinely. But even product photography requires a certain skill to portray the product in the best manner possible – sometimes this is angle and lighting, sometimes this is the right setting or background, and sometimes this is elaborate staging. When we’re trying to show something in particular, it’s important to give the correct impression to the viewer, and the first step is knowing what this should be in the first place. Following close behind is detaching ourselves from the sense of place that we have, just being there, and recognizing whether or not the viewer can get the same sense (or, even better, an entirely different one that we nonetheless express, falsely as it were.) That might be a bit confusing in the abstract, so let me provide an example. We know, from simply being there, that we’re at the beach, or someplace late at night, or whatever, but the image doesn’t necessarily express this unless we include the necessary details therein. Conversely, many of my macro shots, while done in broad daylight, still look like they were done at night, because the aperture and shutter speed reduce the ambient light so far that it doesn’t expose the image very well, while the flash unit provides the main lighting for the subject, yet fails to reach the background. But even showing someone at their profession or hobby takes having an adequate representation of those within the frame. For an artist, it’s not enough to show them drawing on a canvas; we should have a variety of artistic tools visible as well. If we think of an image illustrating a pilot, we ask, what kind of pilot? Commercial, military, bush, glider? Only the knowledgeable viewer would be able to tell these from a glimpse of controls and gauges, so we need to provide more details to inform all of the viewers of what they need to know. Even the subject’s basic appearance and expression counts for a lot – a portrait of a nurse is likely to require an entirely different expression from a portrait of a judge, to give the impression that we want to give. And of course, knowing how to evoke these from a subject, especially so they look natural and not forced, is a huge skillset all its own.
Much harder is the genre of photojournalism, which is what most people think of when we talk about an image with a story. In most cases, we have no ability to stage any portion of the shot, or even mess with lighting, so we have to take it as it is and still get the message across. This means framing and timing become the most important aspects to control, sometimes the only things we have control over. Many times, it means anticipating some particular aspect – action or expression, mostly – and firing off the shutter the moment it happens. An acute awareness of everything in the photo is often necessary. I often tell my students about my wedding photography days, when I was after the ‘first dance’ of the newlyweds. There is actually a very narrow timeframe when the elements tend to come together, because if the guests are in the shot, you want them all looking at the happy couple with delight or warm expressions – one guest looking away, or bored, or eating, is going to spoil the mood of the shot, and this becomes more likely as the seconds pass. Meanwhile, try to find a shooting angle which shows both faces of a couple that are facing one another. And a decent background. And good lighting. These are the kind of things that beginning wedding photographers rarely realize are the skills they never thought to develop. Which is why I say that you save money on a photographer at your own risk.
We read the expressions of any given animate subject (and some inanimate ones,) and nearly every photo can benefit from having something more expressive, more emotional, than simply a straightforward shot. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of observation, and finding the right angle, but most often it takes timing and anticipation. It’s easier with people of course, because they express the emotions that we’re familiar with and we often know when they’re due to arrive. With animals it’s usually very different – most times it doesn’t occur unless the animal is relaxed and acting normally, which is much trickier for wildlife, but can even be a chore when the family pet knows we’re up to something. But for most species, they don’t actually express the emotions we recognize, and when we get something that appears expressive, this is more often than not simply a mistaken impression – which still works just fine, we just can’t anticipate or even provoke it.