Last night we had another full moonrise, and in addition there was a total lunar eclipse, which unfortunately wasn’t visible here in Chicago. But I still made my way down to my favorite beach here in Evanston and the old pier at the north end of Lighthouse Beach. This time I was prodded by a friend of mine to make the journey. Jill Buckner is a photographer who has been working in Atlanta for 20 years and is now splitting her time between Atlanta and Chicago. She wanted to visit the beach with me for a moonrise. I thought why not. It’s cold which will help condition me for the upcoming winter shoots around the Great Lakes and I will have the pleasure of shooting with another photographer who I have never shot with.

It is always interesting to me when you shoot with another photographer, because they may bring fresh eyes to something you look at the same way each time. This can be especially true in the case of a location you have shot repeatedly. As luck would have it the moon came up right on time, yet we were not. So we arrived about 15-20 minutes after it had cleared the horizon. We thought we had more time from looking at the cloud layer out over the lake, which magically disappeared at the time of the rise of the moon. Clearly we should have been on time, especially because the moon was positioned far enough north of east in the sky that it came up right down the pier’s path.

Maybe because of our late arrival we both just went to work rather than looking at the scene and talking about what we would be trying to get in our shots. So you had two photographer’s plying away quietly for the next 70+ minutes through to the darkness if night.

Interestingly we never really crossed paths with each other. She went to one view I another. For me the immediate goal was to get the moon rising over the end of the pier with the posts pointing towards the moon. As the evening went on and darkness fell it was the moon’s glow on the water which came to life and became a stronger element than the moon itself. At this point you are shooting in the dark, with a high ASA – in my case 1600 – but then have noise to deal with in the dark areas of the image. My guess is that if I moved up from the Canon 1Ds III to one of the newer Canon’s like the 5D Mark III which has a much higher ASA scale topping our near 128,000 I would solve this problem.

I look forward to seeing what Jill shot – I’m guessing they are different even though we shot the same place at the same time with similar cameras and equipment. Each of us has their own unique perspective and that is what makes art an individual creative form.

To see more from this evening’s shoot use this link: Moonrise

And to see even more full moon images just search the blog for moon

Cheers,

Richard