Momentary Lapse

Two moon shots in a row? If you’ve been following my work for any length of time you know moon/night photography isn’t an all too common occurrence in this house. It’s not that I don’t love me some moon, it’s just that I lack the requisite gear to make some hay in this department. Long lenses—telephotos—are not (in) my bag, baby. Yet here I am backing up Saturday’s lunar landscape with another moon sunset from Sunday; and as I am sure you’ve heard ad nauseum it was the start of supermoon central on the internets. For the next 24 hours Facebook and Instagram were inundated with giant orbs from our number one satellite. It was a lot like Majora’s Mask only less cool and with a worse soundtrack. Never one to want to miss out on the party I present you my contribution: photographed at 35mm overlooking Barnegat Bay from Barnegat Bay Beach in Barnegat, New Jersey. (Say Barnegat again, Greg. Please.)

Now if you’ll allow me to enter critique mode. Photographing handheld from the bay beach my intention was the get a front focus shot of some lime green mossy stuff strewn about the shoreline. I was shooting wide open at f/1.4 going for shallow depth of field where the middle ground and back ground faded away into smooth bokeh. Most of my shots Sunday were made with this in mind. However, I did pop off a few off frames where I focused out to infinity to bring clarity to the middle ground and back ground. Instead of stopping down to f/5.6 which increases overall sharpness while simultaneously pulling the acceptable range of focus closer to the viewer, I stayed wide open with the aperture. This is why the foreground is somewhat out of focus here. None of this is wrong, of course, and frankly the movement from out of focus and into focus creates a different kind of mood with the photograph. I am just conceding that if I went into this shoot with the goal of producing a sharp landscape, I absolutely would have used my tripod and stopped down to f/5.6 or f/8 instead of going with wide open handheld action.

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