The Cycle

Image Description and Details :

This image represents the cycle of the moon. A long-planned image, began on 15.11.2020 and ended on 14.01.2021. The moon phases are not taken from the same cycle. Most of the moons are from the November-December 2020 cycle, Day 26, 27, 28, 29 are from Dec 2020- Jan 2021 cycle and lastly Day 1 was captured on 14.01.2020. The new moon is an underexposed version of the full moon. Altogether, this image is a result of 60 days (28 days of imaging).

Imaging the different phases of the lunar cycle is nothing new, what I was more interested in, was the representation. And I found the ancient symbol to be perfectly matching the purpose. The dualism of good-bad, chaos-harmony etc is represented by the moon, everyday with its sunshine and earthshine part. The journey is never static, the new moon is completely black to our eyes, then it slowly shined by the sunlight and reaches to the full moon, and then the reverse process as the earthshine part slowly gains its majority till new moon. The first and third quarter shows an equal distribution of the dualism. Our life goes on in the same fashion, at times we are engrossed with happiness, at times with sorrow. But none of them are static, everything goes away with time to bring in something new.

Each moon image is a stack of 2-200 images processed via PIPP, Autostakkert3, Registax, Lightroom and finally composed in Photoshop.

Gear: Nikon D5600, Sigma 150-600c
Image: Stacked and composed
Post-processing: PiPP, Autostakkert3, Registax, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Express (file-size reduction)
Date: 15.11.2020 - 14.01.2021
Location: Kolkata, India

Copyright: Soumyadeep Mukherjee