Mono Lake Sunset Moonrise - a photo on Flickriver

            Sunset over Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra, California.

I arrived at my target site on Mono Lake with minutes to spare. My DeLorme PN-20 GPS has a Sun/Moon feature that confirmed the moon rise time, but it also shows a compass with the Sun and moon on it, so I could point the sun symbol towards the setting sun and there was an arrow pointing to the approximate place on the horizon where the moon would come up. I walked a couple of hundred yards until I could line that forecasted rise spot up with the tufa limestone structures that I wanted to shoot. By the way, you can get a Java program for cell phones that support Java that will do the same thing (most phones know your approximate location info from the position of local cell towers, some provide location based services using a GPS signal).

The moon started to peek out over the hills right on time, and I adjusted my tripod position maybe 6-12 feet to place the moon where I wanted it in the scene. I started with a 70-200mm lense and gradually worked my way up to a wide angle lens as the sunset darkened and spread across the sky.

I often bracket different development settings and tools to use on early edits during postprocessing so I can close in on the best settings and techniques for a given site and lighting conditions.

For this result I left the white balance "as shot", but I think the camera saw the scene differently and the actual event was a bit less blue (at least to my mind's perception... there's truly no such thing as "reality" when it comes to white balance and color perception).  The light does of course shift more towards blue as sunsets progress, so it could well be my perception or my memory that varies from the event.  The people who claim to produce an accurate copy of a given moment crack me up.  Accurate to an electronic device, to one person, or to which people, and under which ambient lighting conditions?  I don't believe that there is any consistency in color perception from person to person (let alone from the original event to viewing a representation of it under different lighting conditions).  The whole claim is a farce.  Must I "go with the flow" and pretend, or is it safe to observe that the "just as it happened" emperor truly has no clothes?

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Taken on: January 10, 2009

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moonrise

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Camera: Canon EOS 40D, f/16.0, 1/15 sec, 70mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 40D
Lens:	EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM
Aperture:	f/16.0
Exposure Time:	0.067 sec (1/15)
Focal Length:	70mm
ISO:	400
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.0 (Windows)
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