Ok, cool, everything that you guys have offered in regards to this makes perfect sense to me. My main confusion was that it appeared to me to be "claiming" that it was indeed 38/39 separate exposures on the one frame, shot over the course of the year and totally unmanipulated from the neg. I think that Tom's explanation :
"You know about matt boxes? A mask is made for the forground. The shots of the sun are made each day with the mask in place, then a sky mask is made and the forground is shot. Camera is probably mounted on a concrete pillar (that is how you do construction record shots), so it will always be in exactly the same place for the sun shots. You can shoot the forground anywhere. Now a days they probably would shoot the forground shot, and do the sun shots on another sheet of film, digitalize then combine in Photo Shop." ...would be the most "unmanipulated" option using matt boxes, that I would be most able to accept. I guess that you guys just assumed from the beginning that it was done in PS etc, where I was trying to get my head around how that image, as we see on screen could have been recorded all on the single frame of film. Of course, it is a cool and interesting shot, no matter how it was produced, I was just trying to understand exactly how it *was* produced. Thanks for all of your very thoughtful responses... tan.
