It is time to get back to blogging and open floho.com up again.
After so many months of not writing anything here, it was really difficult to decide what to say… the amateur’s form of writers’ block, I suppose.
Luckily, this picture gives me a short story to tell that might even convey some sort of meaning.
I took this picture in the early morning hours of January 11th. Although I had heard before that there was a grand photo opportunity of the moon coming up – it being the closest to earth for a long time – it had not crossed my mind to really act on it. As luck has it, I had a nightmare that night, and thus woke up really early. Before going back to sleep, I walked around in my room, and saw the big moon. I mean… the BIG moon. It was incredibly present in the sky, and brighter than I could have imagined. So I scratched my head and decided to take that opportunity right there and then. On came some clothes, the tele-zoom on my camera, the tripod on the balcony and the camera on top. as I started shooting away, switching hands in operating the trigger and warming the other one up – it was bloody cold – my next idea was to take an HDR to capture the whole beauty of the moon as it was. An HDR requires shots being taken at different exposures (I spare you the details), so I set the camera for it, pulled all screws tight on the tripod and took those exposure rows to then later put them together into one, hopefully pretty, picture.
The next day, I opened up the images on the computer and tried to combine them for that HDR I planned to create. What did I find? Bollocks. The head of the tripod must have slowly sagged under the weight of the camera – the position of the moon was shifting between the three images. So I cursed and went to the tripod – not to give the metal a good beating, although I felt like it, but would have lost – but to see what my error had been. I couldn’t find it. All screws were still in position, and no tugging and pushing could move the camera position.
This is when it dawned on my. There had been nothing wrong with the setup. The camera had not moved. The moon had, or rather: I had, because the world kept turning while I took those pictures.
Some things you cannot control. Sometimes, doing everything you can does not change things the slightest bit. That’s nothing to be bitter about – it is something to learn from.
So what did I do? I forgot about the HDR idea, looked at all pictures I had taken, and selected my favorite. The one you are seeing here. And now, it is not only a picture of the big moon anymore – it is the symbol of a little lesson that it taught me.
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