Negative Space

In 1989, I was really getting into my stride with photography.

At 24, I was the assistant manager at a camera store and I took every opportunity to hone my photography skills. My camera was always loaded with 35mm, E-6 slide film, and wherever I went in my car, my camera bag was usually on the floor, behind the driver's seat.

When it was quiet in the camera store, I would pour over the pages of the photography books that we kept behind the display cases, often standing next to the premium SLR cameras. When the sales reps from Nikon or Minolta came to visit, they would always share great tips to get the most out of your camera. (It was through the Minolta rep that I learned the trick of how to advance the crank on my X-700 without moving the film, allowing for the possibility of multiple exposures.)

One summer evening, I drove to the Arboretum to photograph the full moon as it was rising. And while the view from the lookout toward Carleton University and the Rideau Canal is impressive, I decided that I wanted to get a bit more height and I didn't want to include Dunton Tower in my shot, so I moved over near the Heron Road Bridge and parked in the lot to the fairly new St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Shrine.

Back in 1989, this church's domed roof and towers were not yet adorned in gold, but it was still an impressive structure. From its parking lot, I had a clear view of the rising moon, which had a pinkish hue to it.

When I took a few shots, I wished that it was possible to have this Catholic shrine as part of the image, but the building was at my back when I was photographing the moon, and to move to the other side meant that I would have to wait for the moon to rise higher, when it would lose its warm glow.

I had attempted a double-exposure photograph already, with the Chateau Laurier and the moon. Would this full moon look good with this holy structure?

In the composition, I wanted to keep the moon fairly low and I knew that I'd have to visualize the frame as I recomposed the church for the second shot. I decided to keep the building low in the shot, too, creating a negative space of blue sky above.

I had recently read about this technique but had never thought of using it before.

The film was the house brand of Black's Cameras, a 36-exposure, 200 ASA slide film, which was manufactured by Fuji Film. The rule of thumb for shooting the moon was f/8 and a shutter speed that equalled the reciprocal of the lens focal lenght: that is, for a 50mm lens, the reciprocal would be 1/50th of a second, but because the camera didn't have a setting for that speed, you would choose the next-fastest speed, which would be 1/60th of a second.

For this shot, I used my 70-200mm lens, and for the moon I would have zoomed to its maximum magnification (I know this because I still have both the camera and the lens). I would have set the shutter speed to 1/250th of a second.

I then swung around, changed the zoom to 70mm, opened the aperture as wide as I could, f/4.5 (it wasn't a great lens), and shot at the slowest speed that I could, for hand-held, at that magnification, which would have been 1/125th of a second (possibly 1/60th of a second if I was feeling particularly steady).

Here's the shot.

I've been going through my old slides again, looking to digitally revive images that I felt were well-composed or shots where I tried experimenting. With the slide scanned, I used Corel PaintShop Pro 2021 to sharpen the image, provide a bit more contrast, and to pump up the colour a bit, but only because there was some colour loss due to the scanning. The image looks more or less exactly as it does when I hold the slide up to the light.

Oh, yeah, and I removed the dust and other spots that were caught during the scan.

I'll be sharing more of these, perhaps enhancing them through Luminar AI. Stay tuned.