Cosmonaut Grave Variation

by Ginny Schmidt

Title

Cosmonaut Grave Variation

Artist

Ginny Schmidt

Medium

Photograph - Digital Abstract

Description

This is a variation on A Cosmonaut's Grave, treated to look like a cemetery on a moonlit night done, also, in an attempt to edit away as much of the pixelation caused by scanning a 40-hr-old satin finish snapshot print. There will always be issues of noise and clarity in extreme enlargements but, if you check out portions of the image in the green close-up box you will see that a medium to large print would be acceptable, the texturing done on the image as presented is artistically intentional. In any case, there is certainly no question of being able at this point in time to travel back to the Novodavichy cemetery in Moscow in order to get another shot with a better camera - it's just not going to happen.

According to Wikipedia, Pavel Belyayev (1925-1970) commanded the 2-man Voskhod 2 mission in March 1965 in which Alexei Leonov successfully completed a 12 minute spacewalk - the world's first: the US Gemini 4 mission with Ed White's spacewalk was three months later, in June 1965. Named one of the Soviet Union's most gifted commander pilots, Belyayev at 34 was the oldest candidate accepted into the cosmonaut training program in 1960. He died in 1970, five years after the Voskhod 2 mission, from peritonitis resulting from surgery on a stomach ulcer.

The camera I was using on this trip had to have been an inexpensive point-and-shoot variety using a flash cube and a film cartridge. The pictures in my album are all so faded there was virtually no recognizable color in this one when I scanned it - so I tinkered with what was there and came up with something I thought was appropriate for an old Russian cemetery shot. A light half-tone-type screening effect was also added to complete a vintage effect.

Uploaded

July 5th, 2013

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