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A PHOTOGRAPHER USES DIGITAL TECHNIQUES TO REVEAL NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN IMAGES FROM NASA'S ARCHIVES.
By Anita Dennis
For landscape photographer Michael Light, the world was not enough. Back in the early 1990s, while making aerial images of the American Southwest, Light was fascinated by the lunar quality of desert scenery. The attraction started him on a path that has led to the production of Full Moon, a photographic museum exhibit and companion coffee-table book of stunning images captured during the NASA Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"The moon cried out to be recontextualized as a landscape," says Light, whose studio is in San Francisco and has work in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "I had a hunch that there was more to the Apollo archive than the ten or so cliched images we all know so well."
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"The moon cried out to be recontextualized as a landscape."
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Light set out to acquire a selection of the 32,000 images in NASA's Houston library, all of which are without copyright and accessible to the public. But instead of the fourth- or fifth-generation dupes that the agency normally provides, Light convinced the powers that be to release a number of "master" transparencies and negatives - actually second-generation; the true masters are in cold storage - which he digitally processed for his book and exhibit. The large-format digital prints have made the rounds at museums in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and will head this summer to New York City. "Getting the negatives to San Francisco for scanning was the hard part," Light says. "It took patience, persistence, and a very large insurance policy."
Light, who had never used digital photographic techniques before embarking on the Full Moon project, says they were integral to the high quality of the final prints. "Accuracy and subtlety is crucial to any project, but it was especially the case here," he says, "where images were made for scientific purposes and the world they depict is almost surreally sharp because it is without an atmosphere."
The other benefit of digital output is that, once defined, it is reproduceable. "Repeatability is wonderful for maintaining sanity" Light says. "You orchestrate an image once on the monitor that's calibrated to your output method, then tweak it in relation to several test print runs, and then settle on the final. Then, if I need another print for a collector or a museum, boom - one button and it's exactly like all the others, down to the last pixel."
In attempting to replicate the original film as closely as possible, Light worked with San Francisco-based Lotus Color to digitize the images on an Optronics ColorGetter drum scanner. Each of the 1,200 scans was processed manually, capturing all the information in the masters. "There isn't much information past the film grain, but we went just a little bit past that bottom threshold for good measure," Light says.
From there, the images were imported into Adobe Photoshop on Light's Power Mac 8500/120, where he used adjustment layers, curves, the clone tool, and other features to clean up the scans. "A whole lot of moon dust got in those cameras and wound up as black specks on the transparency material and as white specks on the negative. None of it is there anymore in my images," he says.
Color-correcting the images was particularly interesting. Due to the physics of color on the moon and the way color is perceived by film stocks designed for the earth's atmosphere, many false colors were recorded. The master duplicating process added colors as well - terran shades of cyan, magenta, or green - so Light used Photoshop's hue/saturation and color balance functions to modulate or eliminate these casts. "The moon is essentially gray, but my interpretations are certainly subjective," he says.
Light originally planned to output his final prints via film. Instead, he proofed the images for the book with an Epson inkjet printer and ultimately output the large-format images to a Cymbolic Sciences LightJet printer and a Durst Lambda direct-digital printer. "The prints are the sharpest things you've ever seen," Light says.
The Full Moon project will be the inaugural exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York this spring. The companion photographic book (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) is available from Amazon.com.
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