Last Thursday I took advantage of the warm weather (temps in the 70’s!) to go out and photograph the moonrise. One of the things I try not to miss each month is a chance to photograph the moon rising. One to two days before the actual full moon is a good time to do some landscape photography with the moon in the photo. I used The Photographers Ephemeris to scout some locations and decided on heading over to the Pottawatomie fishing lake just outside of Manhattan. I don’t do much photography at this location so I went out a bit early to scout the area and wait for the moon to make its appearance. The photo above was one of the first photographs I made. This photograph was made with a short telephoto (96mm 35mm equivalent).
After shooting for awhile with the short telephoto, I switched to a larger telephoto and starting making some photographs of the moon rising above the treeline on the far side of the lake. I liked how the tree trunks stood out in this photograph.
As I was driving into the lake I noticed a sycamore tree that was really lit up nicely by the sun. I thought it might be a good subject to photograph with the moon rising near it so after photographing around the lake, I left to go back to this tree. I was a little later getting back to the tree than I would have liked, but the moon was still close enough to the tree to make several photographs. I’m going to remember this tree though for the next moonrise! Sometimes you just have to go back to a location a second (or third or fourth) time. Sometimes nature photography is rough like that but I’ll just have to force myself to pick up my camera and head back out to a nice quiet, peaceful location on a beautiful evening and watch the moonrise. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it!
