Happy Full Moon! Here is a beautiful photo of the lunar eclipse featured on Space.Com. I wish it was one of my own photographs, but due to a storm, we were not invited to share the sky. The internet is saturated with photos of the eclipse, but how does it compare to seeing it with your own eyes? Should it even compare? If an artist were to create a stylized rendering of their experience of the eclipse, it wouldn’t be considered wrong or inaccurate. It’s art. And yet, people (like me) tend to diminish or invalidate movies for deviating from the exact letter of the beloved book which inspired it.

Until recently, I was one of those people who refused to see a movie until I read the book. I zealously declared their superiority to their movie counterparts. I can’t cite the exact source of the change. Someone wrote that each media should be considered for its own merits. What I was doing amounted to comparing Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the Venus de Milo and choosing a winner. Film is its own art form and offers different perspectives to the same stories.

Photographs capture an instant. They are stories without words. The artist might draw an image on the face of the moon to commemorate some great love. Whether the artist is trying to accurately record an event or show it through their own eyes, neither is wrong and both deserve to be seen without the shadow of the other blocking its light.