The Barber Peak Experiment
Here’s a fun little photography game we played a few years ago, which I am now resurrecting, and which you are invited to play too.
This is the original image, scanned from a 35mm negative. Click it to download the full-sized version so you can edit it.
It stared in 2000, on a trip called The Shooting Spree. Coming south out of Farmington, New Mexico, just after sunset, I saw the moon rising to my left. As I moved along, I saw a handsome peak ahead, Barber Peak, and stopped to photograph the moon rising behind it. At the time, I was mostly shooting black-and-white film, and didn’t have all that much experience with shooting the night sky in the desert. I made three exposures at about f/8, of 30 seconds, one minute, and 90 seconds. With the ISO 32 film I was using, all three frames ended up too thin (that’s filmspeak for underexposed or underdeveloped), and the best of them, made at 90 seconds, doesn’t print or scan very well.
I still thought it was a seminal moment, and, after some ponderance, decided to play around with it in Photoshop, and share it with a few friends and see what they could make of it. I got some interesting results.
My readers are welcome to download the full-size version by clicking on the thumbnail at left, then clicking that image to get to the full-sized file, then saving it to your hard drive. When you are done editing it, email the result to me at groups@richardbarron.net and I will post it here.
Here are the results of the first round of efforts, including a couple of my own, which were quite amusing. They might give you some ideas about what you’d like to do with this image…
Image by Richard R. Barron
Image by Richard R. Barron
Image by Brenda Wheelock
Image by Brenda Wheelock
Image by Michael D. Zeiler
Image by R. E. Stinson
Themocracy
Very interesting takes on the same file…
I’ll admit I’m not feeling very creative today.
But nice work, everyone.
Actually, your site popped up when I trying to find how to contact Jeff Dixon (of Lawton Constitution years ago). Wonderful photos and hints. I’m not a photog but when I move back to OK I’d enjoy taking your class. thanks for your website.
(Ms.) K.T. Morton