
Supermoon.
Cache la Poudre Canyon, Colorado, 2014.
I don’t go out of my way to photograph the moon, and I certainly don’t buy in to the “supermoon” mania that seems to sweep the media every time we have a supermoon event (for those who don’t know, a supermoon is the coincidence of a full moon or a new moon with the closest approach the moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit, resulting in the largest apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth, this according to my favorite non-authoritative source of knowledge, Wikipedia). Still, if I’m out photographing and the moon happens to wander its way into my frame, I’m happy to work it into the composition.
This basically is what happened a couple of weeks ago during our most recent supermoon. I was driving down Colorado Highway 14 in Cache la Poudre Canyon, just happened to glance out the driver’s side window, and saw this scene coming together along the ridge at the top of the canyon walls. So, I pulled over the vehicle, set up my tripod, and made a couple of quick captures before heading on my way. Probably took no more than 5 or 10 minutes, tops.
In case you’re wondering, the moon was indeed quite large, larger than normal, but not in reality as large as it appears to be in this photograph. The photograph was captured with a 400mm lens on my full-frame Canon 5D Mark ii, creating the telephoto effect of a moon just a bit bigger than it really was.