Almost Famous (Again)

I was thrilled to get a text from my friend who is the head of multimedia at the newspaper I used to work for.  He wanted to know if I was going to shoot the "Blue Super Moon" on Wednesday night.  I wasn't planning to do that because it was our meeting night, but I said I would shoot it for him, because it would be fun.  It is a "blue moon" because it is the second full moon this month, and it is a "super moon" because the moon is closer to us at this time.  The moon's orbit is not circular, but rather elliptical, so sometimes it is closer  to us and other times it is further away.  These new popular names like "super moon" and "blue moon" are not astronomical terms.  We call the close moon a perigee moon, for instance.  So to get this shot I needed to be on a beach of an exclusive area on Long Island, and I called the police department and they told me where to park and gave me permission.  Only thing was, I had to walk for a mile and a half to get to the place on the beach where the moon would show up in the same picture as the power plant stacks.  So carrying all my cameras and lenses and tripod the walk took me about 30 minutes in the sand.  The other thing was that it was cloudy and I was worried I wouldn't see the moon at all.  Well, I didn't see it rise but about 10 minutes later I finally saw the moon through the clouds for a short while.  Whew!  But now, since I was on deadline I had to race back to my car - I decided to cross some private property (at night!) to get to the road so I could walk faster and then drive to my friend's house.  We decided that was the quickest way to edit the photos and prepare one and caption and send it to the paper.  Our deadline was 9:00 PM.  He sent the image from his home at 8:59 and we made the deadline!  Whew!

So this is what the page looked like in the newspaper that was delivered to our door!  This is a copy of the online version of the paper.  I have to tell you, it is still a thrill to see my work in print! I guess when it is in your blood, it never goes away!

As I was driving home, which took about 45 minutes, the moon kept rising and it was in a clear sky.  So I stopped at a baseball field in town and set up again to do this photograph of the full moon not obscured by clouds.  What a beautiful thing this moon of ours is, isn't it?  It was such a satisfying evening to plan everything and have the plan work in spite of weather.  A really rewarding feeling.