Playing with images like that is a great way to learn about how tones work. I don’t make any claims for this one, but I think that lightening the sky would make it unrealistic as a nighttime picture, as well as diminish the silvery softness of the clouds.

Here, my attention is captured by the sky, the soft clouds.

Looking, under ‘curves’, at the histogram of the picture, I found that you did not include the extreme lightest end of the range. Using ‘threshold’, I found the lightest pixel and then used the white eyedropper to extend the histogram across the entire range (I do methods but I cannot talk methods yet). As expected, the sky became harsher.

I assume that you left the sky soft on purpose. - I got into the habit of checking the histograms of images of photographers, Butzi etc.

You chose the contrast between the hard-edged tree and the soft-edged clouds, with only an implied moon. Yet you wrote about “moon” as if that were your subject.

It’s that combination of elements — soft/hard, indirect, yet a luminousness of the unseen — that intrigues me. It’s lots more complex even than the question of grammar. And more complicated, too.

So I’d say you are grappling with the complexity of the unseen which nevertheless makes its presence known, even in the text that accompanies the photo.

Is that enough pseudo-psych for one day? [add snort]

If the moon were present, it would be round and bright like the clouds, but sharp-edged and with detail like the trees, so I suppose it would be intermediate in character. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a native speaker of English, where there is no grammatical gender!

Sorry to have come across a tad snarky — I find myself fighting to maintain the idea that words do matter and should be used with intentionality — re: “whatever” and “you know what I mean.”

I like the subtleties of the Boroditsky article and find it appropriate to our current political scene. As usual, of course, the variable of culture interferes with absolute clarity of findings.

What I find a bit more interesting, however, is trying to discern, through the visual, what my perceptions are and how they compare to the perceptions of others who are being equally attentive. That’s why psychogeography has fastened itself onto my thinking.

It’s clear to me that the dichotomy of male and female is deepset in the human mind and it will take a lot more work to equalize, if not erase, the perceptions of difference.I’m too old to take that one on. But your moon or my moon, I think, could be less than male/female differences than cultural/experiential. So how does the visual work you did in this photograph illuminate your perception of the moon? I ask so as to check if that perception is close or far from mine.

I’m interested in the ways language matters. The twenty-Eskimo-words-for-snow myth has been thoroughly debunked, but I had long convinced myself that it wouldn’t matter anyway: how well you observed snow, what you saw and learned from it, depended on your interest and your experience with snow. Not on how many words your language supposedly had for forms of snow. Although language is clearly important in many areas of thought, I was also convinced that a great deal of highly conscious thought–especially visual–could and did occur without the need for language.

From another perspective, I resisted the notion that, say, women photographed differently from men. For a wide variety of reasons, they might tend to have different interests that would certainly affect their work, but that seemed more superficial, not a fundamental difference in seeing.

Boroditsky’s research is causing me to re-examine these positions.

Birgit,

That the plural article is also die has always felt to me like an “accident” without significance. In Spanish the gender distinction remains in the plural, in French it is dropped but there’s no coincidence as iin German, in Russian there are no articles… But perhaps, for native speakers, this coincidence has some hidden impact on tendencies of thinking?