Shooting the Moon

You may have noticed the subjects of my blog have changed a bit. Yes, I spend a lot of time filming birds, but they are not the only target of my camera.  I shoot other things too and I thought I would expand to other subjects as well.

I had long noticed on the night of the full moon, it was almost always positioned nicely against the steeple of a local church. The steeple always has a light on and I wanted to be able to include that in the image also. I finally decided to act on it one cloudless evening.
 
The thing about filming the moon is you don't actually want to take the image on THE night of the full moon. Since, on that night, the sun is going down exactly at the same time the moon is rising, it becomes dark too quickly.  Unless the moon is right on the horizon, we don't tend to notice how fast it is moving, but it's relatively fast movement means you have to use a fairly fast shutter speed if you don't want the moon to be blurred in the photo. On the night of the full moon, it becomes too dark too quickly to accomplish this.

If you think of sunset as zero hour, each night the moon rises about an hour earlier than the night before. So, on the night of the full moon, the sun is setting and the moon is rising at the same hour.  The following night, however, the sun is still one hour from setting when the moon rises. In this image, I had to wait almost an hour for the moon to ascend to a point where I could get the steeple in the same picture, so it was nearly dark. There still was enough light to use a shutter speed that would render the moon tack sharp while rendering the sky a nice dark blue twilight color.

One unexpected bonus in this image was the reflection of the sunset in the round window at the bottom.  It never occurred to me that I might be able to capture that also.  I later added an appropriate verse from the Bible.