Lunar Cradle

One evening recently, when my wife and I were walking up our street as the sun was setting and the world was calming down for the night, she pointed up to the sky and remarked at how beautiful the thin crescent moon looked with one lone star hovering next to it. It was a singular scene that doesn’t come along very often, and we both discussed it as we continued the few blocks left in our walk before turning up our driveway. Conditions have to be just right to see something like this in the sky–not just the waxing crescent moon, but the brilliance of a small secondary star (in this case, the planet Venus) right nearby as if stopping by to say goodnight as well as the diminishing daylight that leaves just enough of the surrounding scenery visible to put everything into context.

As soon as we got home I asked her, knowing that we had chores to do and kids to start getting ready for bed, if she minded me riding my bike down the block to take a picture. She did not :) I grabbed my D750 and 70-200mm lens, hopped on my bike, and rook off eastward to the corner by my neighbor’s field. That, of course, might make one wonder: why not just take a picture from my driveway? Why bother biking a few blocks away? The answer, as you might have guessed if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, lies in the concept I alluded to a few sentences ago: context.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that anyone can take a camera, point it at the sky, and snap a picture of the moon. A basic shot of the moon isn’t that difficult, and even many mobile phones with a zoom lens can do a fairly good job of taking a picture of our nearest celestial neighbor. (Though who knows if the results you get from a mobile phone are real or just pretend to be real.) What helps elevate a lunar image is a sense of context: where is it in relation to the viewer? The surrounding scenery? The rest of the sky? What about weather, time of day, cloud cover, birds, airplanes, or anything else that might help put the image of the moon in some kind of space that the viewer can relate to?

The answer for me, and the reason I hopped on my Salsa Timberjack and went down the road to get a picture, was my neighbor’s tree. An empty dark blue sky with nothing but the thin crescent moon and its planetary counterpart would have been fine, but not all that interesting. But the same shot with a tree in the corner, to help give a sense of place for the viewer, is something else entirely. The tree helps the viewer understand that the moon and Venus are low on the horizon–without it they could be anywhere in the sky. It creates a mood of peace and even slight isolation since there’s not a field of trees but one lone tree all by itself. Basically, even though the moon and Venus are obviously playing the main roles, the tree gets its own star as Best Supporting Actor.

All this goes to show the importance of extra elements aside from the main subject when taking a picture. It’s a lesson that took me years to learn, but has dramatically increased the quality of my photos since this whole journey started.