Ever kick yourself because you picked up a book, then decided not to get it, then kick yourself later on ? Yup. I picked up this book called "Full Moon" at a used bookstore in Houston, flip through it and though about it for a while before not getting it. I had already found a copy of William Claxton's "Jazz Life" and that cost a pretty penny but days later, I thought about that book.
It wasn't a large book, in fact was more in a smaller size but the images struck me the same. I was born a few years after man touched down on the moon and I remember watching the first Space Shuttle in 1981 and as many of our readers, remember that day in '86 with the Challenger disaster. Perhaps because I grew up in Houston with the Johnson Space Center that I became intrigued with space but as many kids did in my generation, Space was and always is the final frontier.
NASA has 32,000 still images from the Apollo missions and Michael Light spent 5 years looking through the archives. He was allowed to take 1,200 original slides/negatives from NASA, had them scanned and edited together 129 images into this one book. The photos are crystal clear. The shot of the astronaut (second from below) was so detail, I ran my fingers over the page. In the past we've seen the moon landing through shaky fuzzy black & white images and now in this book, everything looks sharp and detail.
This reminds me of a movie "In the Shadow of the Moon" that came out back in 2007. This film can only be really appreciated in the theater - to see such larger than life images of the footage was amazing enough.
Oh, interesting enough, Michael Light will be at photoLA this month to talk about his book Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack.
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