Supermoon - 19/52 - © 2012 Dion Vansevenant (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Last night (May 5, 2012) marked the moon’s perigee, it’s closest point to Earth this year, and one of it’s closest passes in a while. Folks dubbed it the “supermoon” because it was going to be closer and bigger-looking and brighter. Naturally many photographers went ga-ga over this and set out to capture this event. To celebrate, we built a fire in our backyard and prepared some nibbles.
Unfortunately Mother Nature conspired against some of us, and some heavy cloud cover rolled in just before Moonrise. Fortunately some of us are persistent and know that clouds, eventually, move.
As I was playing with my camera, changing settings and trying different angles (got a couple of neat fire shots, I think) I noticed that the clouds were glowing. So, I went around to the front to get a better view of things.
Sure enough, the moon was illuminating the clouds from behind, creating a bit of a lightbox. So, I settled in against our truck to brace myself and stabilize my camera as best I can without a tripod, and began snapping away.
Now, I wasn’t blindly shooting. I was evaluating my shots, trying different settings, noting the effects, and waiting for the clouds to move. So, I had some time between some of the shots when the cloud cover was simply too heavy to present a good image, and got to just kind of hang out.
Ordinarily this would not be an issue, but we’ve recently had a raccoon start hanging around, and he’d made an appearance over our fence earlier to see what the kerfuffle was with the fire. Plus, we saw an opossum in our backyard one early morning. So, I was a little more alert to noises than usual. Well, not entirely alert.
At one point I was shooting and happened to pause and look down to see the possum trundling down the driveway and come right up to my foot. It sniffed at me, realized I was not something it wanted to deal with, and backtracked around the other side of our truck and disappeared. And right after he disappeared, so did I: Up the driveway and into the backyard with the other two-foots around the fire. Naturally I received some ribbing for my reaction.
All-in-all, I filled my 8GB card, and made a pretty good dent in my 4GB card. Unfortunately my trial of Lightroom has run out, so it’s going to take a bit longer to take a look at all of the images and play with them, but I did find this one, and play with it a little in the GIMP. So, at least I have something to show for the 2012 supermoon.
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At least the clouds decided to break, even if the wildlife didn’t. Lovely moon shot.