Shoot The Moon

On Saturday night, I was jarred from my cozy apartment by a text message shortly after midnight that sent me scrambling for my jacket and camera bag.

Flipping open my phone, I found the following:

"Dude, you better be outside taking pictures of
this moon and the blue landscape!"

I went to my front window and peered up into the sky, and then to my back window. Nothing.

I sent back a quick text:

"I have no idea what you're talking about...
but I'm running out the door to look."

When I got outside, I realized I would've needed a hole in my ceiling, and the roof above, to see the moon from the comfort of my couch, as it was directly overhead.

It was full, and bright, and formed an eerie glowing ring around it. I tried to snap a few photos, but thought a big glowing ball in the center of the frame might make for a rather boring shot, so I almost leaned against my building, and shot straight up into the air.

If I tried to get the moon in sharp focus, the ring around it...and most of the building, for that matter...disappeared from the frame. So I settled for this shot, which makes the moon look almost like a headlight. It wasn't...but it was close. And I kind of like the weird angle of this shot.

And the ring. Had to get the ring. That's not a camera trick...that was actually visible in the sky.

Then I got in my car and drove a couple of miles out of town and parked on a dark, lonely road where I spent a little time several years ago, lying on the hood of my car at about 3:30am trying unsuccessfully to see some of the Leonids meteor shower.

Here's where I first understood what my buddy meant when he said "the blue landscape." The moon was glowing so brightly that it illuminated the earth pretty well, and as I stood outside of my car and looked around, there was a faint blue tint to everything.

As I stared at the moon straight above me, I knew there was no chance to get a shot that would include both the moon and any part of the landscape for reference, so I took out my zoom lens and fooled around with a few settings that I'm sure a professional would tell me weren't the "correct" ones...but as I brought the moon into focus in the middle of the frame, it showed a little detail and some of its features, and that was good enough for me.

I clicked around with my camera until my fingertips were nearly frozen, and hoped that I had something on my card that would look good on the screen.

It's not an artsy moon shot, and it's cropped so it looks more like a photo that you'd see in a textbook to define parts of the moon's surface.

But I took it. And I think it rocks.

I don't think I've ever been as grateful for
txt msging (and txt msgrs!) as I was on Saturday night.

"Yeah we all shine on,
like the moon,
and the stars,
and the sun."
—John Lennon