Waxing Gibbous

Moon 08-15-2013_5277

When Mother and I headed out to the store for me to buy some bottles of water to freeze for my road trip back home, the moon was just starting to break over Neighbor Bolton’s house.

You can’t ignore a good mooning in Cape, so I grabbed my camera, underexposed by about five stops and came up with this. For you photo geeks, I normally use a polarizing filter to darken the sky. In this case, I dialed it back because I liked the little bit of blue hanging around. (Click on it to make it larger.)

If all goes as planned, this will be the next-to-last moonrise I see in Cape. We’re supposed to meet a plumber over at the trailer on Kentucky Lake Saturday morning, then I head south.

When I got home, I fired up my trusty Moon Phase Pro ap to find out what I was seeing was the moon 78% full (waxing gibbous).

A bicycle named Nostalgic

I’ve often thought about naming my bicycle Nostalgic.

That way, when Wife Lila asks were I’m going, I can say with a perfectly straight face, “Out to wax Nostalgic.”

Other moon shots

Cinco de Mayo Super Moon

Riding partners Anne and Osa thought the night of the Super Moon would be a good time for me to take my first bike ride since my crash on February 19. We had planned it earlier, but weather hadn’t cooperated. We were going to watch the moonrise from the Lake Worth Beach, but there’s a tall drawbridge to go over, so they suggested we check out a new park with boardwalks going out into the Intracoastal Waterway north of the Lake Worth Bridge. I guess they didn’t want to risk having to tow me over the bridge if I hadn’t gotten my legs back. Click on any image to make it larger.

Boardwalk puts you out over water

It’s a beautiful place to sit. The mangroves behind you muffle the city sounds. The breeze off the water was actually a little on the chilly side. We got there a little early, so my partners talked me into riding back into Lake Worth for a sinfully good ice cream cone.

Traffic was pretty heavy and I heard a car with a bunch of guys in it hootin’ and hollerin’ in the next lane coming up behind me. This sounds like trouble, I thought. When they got closer, I could see if was a bunch of young Hispanic guys wishing everybody within earshot a happy Cinco de Mayo. Dial the Threat-o-Meter back to green again.

Super Moon over Lake Worth Beach

We got back to the boardwalk from our ice cream run with a couple minutes to spare before Osa spotted the big orange ball coming out of the haze above Lake Worth Beach. It was huge, but indistinct until it got a little above the horizon. We’ll go a little photo geeky on the rest of the pix. If you don’t care for technical details, just skip over them like I do names in a Russian novel.

Light turned blue

With the sun going down, the sky picked up a bluish cast. The exposure here is 1/30 of a second @ f/5.6. The camera boosted the ISO to 500 from my normal 200. I was underexposing the photo by as much as four stops to keep the moon from becoming a white blob. I was zoomed to the max at 55mm on my 18-55mm zoom lens. It would be nice to have a longer lens, but I like to travel light on the bike.

Boat adds movement

Several boats went by, but this one showed up best. I zoomed out for a bit wider shot than the previous one. This was zoomed to 34mm. The exposure was 1/30 @ f/5.0 and the ISO was 400.

I love digital photography for the ability to change the film “speed” with every shot. With film, you were committed to one type of film and speed for the whole roll. That’s one reason why I carried three cameras: each one might be loaded with a different type of film to cover every contingency.

Switched to video camera for big moon shot

Since I didn’t have a longer lens for my Nikon D3100, I switched to my Canon FS100 video camera video camera in still mode for a tight shot of the Super Moon. I didn’t expect it to be tack-sharp because I was zoomed way in and using a 1/25 second shutter speed. I was braced against the boardwalk, but the water pounding the pilings caused some movement.

Street lights shift everything orange

Just before we left, I started experimenting with other than moon photos. This shot of the Lake Worth draw bridge was taken when pretty much all of the light was gone from the sky except for the moon. The camera bumped the ISO up to 3200 and dropped the shutter speed down to half a second @f/5.6.

Here’s what the big bridge looks like in the daylight, plus a little history of the original bridge built in 1919.