For those unfamiliar with Europa, it is one of Jupiter’s 79 known moons with a water-ice crust. There is a hypothesis that life could exist in the oceans beneath this crust. I read a book by Jeremy Robinson, Beneath, about an expedition to Europa some time ago, a great sci-fi adventure piece. And another adventure takes place in the film Europa Report, a recommended watch if you like this genre. Just two examples of the fascination of what could be on this moon.

Combine this with the aspect that our Sun is growing more luminous over long periods of time – about 6% every billion years. So in theory, at some point in the far, far future when the energy from the Sun becomes so intense, life won’t exist on Earth anymore. But perhaps, just maybe, the crust will melt on Europa, and life will begin (if it hasn’t already) and rise above the surface of this moon.

Europa became the unexpected and initially unintentional inspiration in playing around with this image. It is an image I made back in 2007 while photographing ice on Lake St. Clair. One of the cool things about being there so early in the morning is witnessing the enormous congregations of ducks if there are any spots of open water. It isn’t guaranteed, but sometimes you get lucky if they are close.

This particular day, it was very, very grey. In fact, the sky was just pretty much a blank white canvas if you adjust the white-point of the image to be that way. So for the longest time, I had this pretty cool image of this mass of Canvasbacks in flight, which was kinda interesting in a minimalist sort of way.

I stumbled upon it again this week and began to wonder if I should do anything more with it. I played with some textures – nope. I played with some colors – nope. Nothing was really mentally clicking. Maybe I should just leave it alone? Then I had a thought – what if…

Now, I am going to preface this by saying I am not really a fan of what I was about to do. But I am a fan of playing – for playing sake when it comes to sparking ideas. Placing boundaries on creative endeavors is usually counterproductive. It is a fairly recent trend being adopted into a lot of software programs, one that I normally pass by because of lack of interest. It’s a thing being whispered about in dark hallways of photo conventions and real estate agents and blatantly in software ads. That very thing I cringed hearing two people talking about while I was photographing on Lake Huron this winter “oh – I am not worried about blowing that out, I’ll swap it out later.” Yes, I am referring to Sky Replacement! The “Milli Vanilli option” for photography. 😉

Of course, the practice of Photomontage isn’t new at all. Henry Peach Robinson was an early pioneer in the late 1800s in combining negatives to create scenes that did not exist within a single exposure. It is just so much easier now to do so and to do so in a manner that you can literally flip through scenes to your liking.

It is a too common occurrence with photographers to overlook the inadaptability of a scene to artistic treatment, merely because they think it lends itself to the facility, which their art possesses, of rendering, with wondrous truth, minutiae and unimportant details. To many this rendering of detail, and the obtaining of sharp pictures, is all that is considered necessary to constitute perfection; and the reason for this is, that they have no knowledge of, and therefore can take no interest in, the representation of nature as she presents herself to the eye of a well-trained painter, or of one who has studied her with reverence and love.

Henry Peach Robinson

While I personally do not care what people do in their pursuit of art, some are going to be disingenuous – a la the “Milli Vanilli” route, no matter what others think. The artist lives with it and may or may not face the consequences of doing so. The whole aspect of the disclosure is an enormous gray area of trying to define where you draw the line of what isn’t and what is.

I hate to admit that I was impressed by how it transformed this image. I cycled through the various free skies available within Luminar (v 4.2), from the really corny galaxy backgrounds to some pretty darn nice clouds and various sunsets. The latter looked quite realistic, and if I had the intention, could pass it off as real. (That is until someone pulled up another image of a different subject, with the same sky. Ahem.)

But wait, there’s more!

You don’t have to stop at the sky, you can then add sky objects, from space shuttles to planets to the Milky Way. It can get really downright silly and absurd if you want it to be. But what the hell, it is playtime. I settled on an image of Jupiter and a close moon (perhaps IO?) and that is where the idea started gelling together at what this could represent. What if this were a fantasy of life emerging on a melting Europa?

So there I ended. Just like the novels and the films, a fiction with some basis in reality, but ultimately a fiction, an idea. And I certainly hope it is obviously fiction, because without the Jupiter image there, it looks as if I was there for a very cool moment with a great sky. I haven’t used this feature of Luminar (now also available in Photoshop) on any landscape images of mine. It just feels strange knowing the same sky could appear in another image. This “Europa” sky likely exists in other images on the internet right now.

And that leads to so many other questions – with ease of doing so, are dramatic skies about to become the next set of one-click Instagram filters? Are those awe-inspiring moments of being there about to become commoditized? I have so many mixed feelings about it, it is hard to come to any fixed position. From the perspective of just creating art, it seems easy. But from the aspect of bearing witness, it becomes grayer.

All I know is that I had a little fun playing, a little fun dreaming. Life may exist right now on Europa. And if not now, perhaps when the ice melts. By then, nobody will certainly care about the blasphemy in this image.