More aimed at the scientific aspect than the artistic, I put it here.
55 years ago, Ansel Adams took a photograph of the moon over the Clark Range, taken from Glacier Point in Yosemite. Astronomers have determined that the exact position of Earth, Moon and Sun would occur again at 7:03 PM 9-15-2005. So what better to do than go out and try to re-create the picture?
Old Pic Here.
New Pic Here.
Cool.
Very cool.
Very very cool.
Eh.
OK, I find the forensic astronomy part cool, but the photo itself is pretty unremarkable (both the original and the new one.) I’ve seen much better stuff by Ansel Adams, so why is this one so important?
I don’t know, a lot of “great” photographs don’t do anything for me. As for this one, I was just surprised that someone would go to all the trouble of tracing it back, down to the minute. It’s also surprising to me that the same set of circumstances only occur every 19 years, I would have thought it would be a yearly happening or something.
The whole exercise sounds more like a college assignment rather than the fanatical quest to unravel a work of art.
You see a lot of these in Sky and Telescope and the like – it’s a challenge to figure out precisely when Ansel Adams took the photo, based on the location of the sun or the moon or the shadows or something. It’s a big puzzle/game. Being able to take a photo under nearly identical circumstances is just an instant way of ptroving you were right and could predict the circumstances again.
I’ve never seen it with any other photographer – only Ansel Adams.