fourpointedstar

I’ve long wanted to capture an aircraft that is traversing the moon, but have not taken the time (or patience) to plan for that photo.  But the other night when I was walking into the house, I watched an aircraft nearly pass in front of the moon.  The resulting photo is not my best image of an airplane or of the moon, but I find the motion blur to add to the image.

There are two easy rules to follow when you start photographing the world around you: always have your camera ready and always look for a great photo. As I was driving home from the girl’s high school, I spotted the sliver of the moon with the dusk colors; the water in the pond offered a wonderful blue hue as well, so I turned on my hazard lights and hopped out of my car to capture the scene.

I’d passed this scene for a few mornings; the singular shaft of sunlight spilling through the forest skylight; however, there was no where to park along this stretch of Winfield Road (and the road has a curb too).  Instead I pulled up Google Maps to find the nearest spot and decided to walk to the scene.

I love the mystical feeling and wonder if you could find a sacred sword in that spotlight?

At this particular corner at the southwest corner of Herrick Forest Preserve, there are two trees standing alone.  They’re not full, in fact that they’re kinda odd, but they make fantastic silhouettes against the pre-dawn hues of the late summer.

There’s a bit of a story behind this photo:
In late August and early September, the sun is at the exact correct spot for wonderful sunrise photos on my drive into work. A couple of days before this photo, the mixture of sunrise and fog was perfect. I took a dozen photos that I was very excited about, and once I got to my office, I turned my camera back on to see the images that I’d captured.

And that was how I discovered that my Sony doesn’t have any alert when you press the shutter that there are not SD cards in the camera…I’d missed all of those (in my imagination) wonderful photos. So, for the next week, I stopped at the same three locations and captured sunrise photos, attempting to recreate those images that in my memory were perfect.

Anyway, I simply love this photo. I’ve shown it to a few people, one of whom said that it needs more tonal range or the addition of another color (roll back all that yellow to get some blue into the image)…but I like that early morning punch of yellow.