And...Last Light

Friday night, when the TV weatherman announced the full moon-rise for Saturday would be at 6:05 pm, and predicted the sky to be clear, I decided to scratch off a bucket list item.  To that end, at 5:30 Saturday evening, my husband and I drove to a neighboring town with a lovely view of, you guessed it, a lighthouse, from across  the harbor.  Yeah, I know. Lately, all of my posts are of a similar theme and well, sorry. 

Actually, I’m not. The thing of it is, I love the water, I love lighthouses and I never get tired of where we live. That said, pictures of the moon rising from the ocean in front of this particular light are almost cliché in our neck of the woods, but I’ve never taken one and I was pretty jazzed that the timing and the weather would be right to do so.  Anxious to get a good shot, once we arrived, I asked my husband’s opinion as to the best place to stand. He laughed and pointed.  “It looks like that’s the right spot.”  Gulp.  About twenty photographers had staked out positions on the parking lot, the rocks and the sandy strip beside the harbor.  No word of a lie, they all had cameras with lenses half the length of my arm. 

 

Keeping my amateur-photographer distance, I set up my tripod and waited.  When we got close to the appointed time, everyone started checking their watches.  “I’ve got 6:03,” “Mine says 6:06.”  The moon, which should have appeared magnified and orange just over the horizon, didn’t…until, finally it bled through a haze, a ghost of itself, appearing as a fingernail, then a half, and then the image for which we all waited. The photographer closest to me cursed. “Damn clouds.”

Clouds or not, I clicked away, until satisfied, I stopped. Then, while all those pros scrabbled across the rocks, lugging their tripods over the sand, determined to take pictures from different angles, I simply watched the moon climb in the sky—which, in my mind, was the best picture anyone could get, anyway.