My #Supermoonfail

Updated November 15th. I didn’t like the photo I used so I replaced it with a shot I took this evening.

Since today marked the closest the moon will come to earth for the next 18 years I thought I’d go out and grab me an image of that big, bad, moon.

I didn’t get off to the best start. Moonrise where I live was due at 6:01 pm. I live in a suburb to the west of Houston so the moon would be rising over a metropolis with a bazillion street lights. Also, anyone familiar with this part of the world knows that it’s flat. The only elevation near me is a man made hill in my neighborhood that rises perhaps 20-feet. Enough to put me at roof height.

I knew I didn’t want lots of street lights in my image but I wanted something for scale so I thought of a place nearby where I could put a radio tower in the foreground. I hurriedly stuffed some photo essentials into my F-stop backpack and headed out to my spot – 5 minutes drive plus 10 minutes walk and I’d be there.

As I walked along the levee I was taken by the rich, orange, post-sunset glows behind me. But I knew I didn’t have time to take a shot if I was to get the moon, so I walked on.

When I got to my spot, I found I had to move because of one particular streetlight that would be in my field of view. As I was setting up I caught a glimpse of the moon rising into a cloud bank.

I cursed that I was late but at the same time I was grateful as I knew the cloud bank would give me a few more minutes to setup. I wanted my longest lens, which is my 400mm. I dug around in my bag, pulled it out and set it on my camera. Then I went to mount it on my tripod only to find that I’d grabbed the wrong tripod foot. I have one with a Really Right Stuff quick release plate and one without. I’d brought the one without.

What now? I can hand-hold for the moon but not the foreground. Maybe I can use the foot from my 28-300mm? Well, Canon didn’t design for that but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. That extra 100mm of focal length made quite a difference so I managed to get the ring of the 28-300mm foot to kind of hold on the lens barrel of the 100-400mm.

Now my problem was the absence of light. It was so dark where I was that to get any detail in my foreground blew out the moon and to get any detail in the moon, my foreground was completely black.

And then I discovered I’d forgotten my flashlight so I couldn’t do the light painting of my foreground interest tree that I have half conceptualized.

And then the bugs started biting.

So, I took a few frames of the supermoon without anything to contrast it with and decided to head home. After all, There’s always 2034!

Below is one of those frames, my #supermoonfail 161114.