Image of the week
A long-awaited shot
12 Jun 2023
What makes a great photograph? Sometimes it's just seizing the moment—what Magnum photo agency founder Henri Cartier-Bresson called the "decisive instant" when people, shapes, light or movement can be frozen into a pattern that is both graphic and poetic. But sometimes it can be exactly the opposite, like in this "Image of the week" by Donato Lioce, head of the ITER Tokamak Cooling Water System Section.
"For three years I tried to get precisely this image," he says. Whereas the moon's position could be exactly anticipated, the worksite lights, the position of the cranes and, above all, weather conditions were critical elements. At 9:17 p.m. on Saturday 3 June, everything came together and magic was made.
In order to obtain the striking effect of the moon's "closeness," Donato used a powerful telephoto lens mounted on his Fujifilm XT-3 APS-C camera and shot from a location 4.5 kilometres away from the ITER site, on the other side of the Durance River. "As it had been raining heavily for the most of the afternoon, the atmospheric dust was washed to the ground and the air was almost perfectly transparent." The result: awesome.
Donato's pictures, which he calls "astrolandscapes," can be viewed on his Instagram page.