I have a month or so of “daily images” in the queue and “pre-posted” on this site. On a given day, my mind is often on different photographs than those you see appearing here – for example, right now I’m focusing on photographs from a trip over the Golden Gate Bridge to Point Reyes National Seashore that I took earlier this week. Consequently, I’m occasionally mildly surprised to see the new daily image when it appears in the blog. Sometimes the timing turns out to be interesting.

Yesterday I read Jim Goldstein’s post on digital (and film) image manipulation and creation, Digital Double Exposures: Blasphemy or No Big Deal?” over at his blog. I thought I left a comment, but it doesn’t seem to be there today. What I wrote was more or less that I don’t have any particular problem with some manipulation of an image, but that it can bother me when the result is presented as if it were “real” yet is impossible. I thought of a striking photograph of Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa that I once saw – a stunning panorama with a sky that would be just about impossible over this desert locale. A much bigger problem was that this sunset was somehow magically happening due north of the playa…

This is not to say that I object to the use of photo manipulation techniques, either in camera or in post-processing. There are at least two circumstances in which I’m fine with the idea and do it myself. For example, I have recently experimented with “imaginary landscapes” – images based on photographs that have been modified to a scene that clearly could not exist in the real world. (The linked example is not a photomontage, but a single image that was manipulated in post-processing.)

It turns out that today’s photo of the moon and some oak leaves is an example of different situation in which I think that post-processing manipulation is appropriate – in this case to create a more accurate sense of what my eyes actually saw. In reference to Jim’s post, this photo is a sort of double exposure (triple exposure, actually). In this case I was trying to capture a view of the moon over some trees that I saw as I hiked along this central California trail. Since I had to use a long lens to get a large enough image of the moon, there was not enough depth of field to also get the leaves in focus. In fact, there wasn’t even enough DOF to get the front and back leaves in focus. So, I did three exposures: one for the moon, one for the more distant leaves at upper right, and another for the closer leaves at lower left. The three exposures were stitched together to create what I am certain more accurately reflects my experience of seeing this scene than any of the three separate images could have.