Posts Tagged "full moon"

At the beginning of the year, I spent a few days in Nice before going to Ethiopia (more on this in another post). I knew that Monaco has nice fireworks for the New Year celebration and I had enough knowledge where they would be fired from to pick a nice view from a higher elevation as I wanted to capture the harbor, the Monaco Castle and the fireworks. There are only a few places that are public accessible to catch that view. The next evening, I went to the Chateau de Nice (castle). From the Castle, there is only one tower left and the city made a park from the land where the Castle once was. The Castle was located on the closest hill from the sea, with the Old City at its feet. During Christmas time, a gigantic Ferris wheel is installed in nearby downtown. From...

If you don’t know, my family comes from the Pyrenees region. A small town on the road to the Tourmalet pass (for you cyclists). A couple weeks ago, I spent a week there to see my family and I took a couple pictures. I did not take that many pictures because I was, one, busy visiting my family and two, the weather was not cooperating and three my brother, who lives there and is a professional photographer, has better images anyway. Lourdes is a town known for the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Since that time, pilgrims comes to Lourdes to pray. One of the great moment, is the night time procession with candles. This year, one of the largest procession happened to coincide with the full moon. When the full moon was rising, I framed it...

Tonight I went out to take pictures of the full moon. I have always wanted an image of the Hoover tower that is on Stanford campus. After studying the campus map, I came up with only one potential good location but there was no parking nearby and if you know the Stanford campus, it’s pretty hard to park. I found a parking spot almost 1 mile away but I figured that with enough time I would be able to walk to my location in time. I did not know that the path I was planning on using is closed for renovation and the bridge over the San Francisquito creek is also closed. After going around (even cutting thru the golf course) and not finding any options, time was running out. Moon rise happens at a very precise time and it does not wait. When all your plans fail,...

Sunday night’s supermoon was the brightest and closest to Earth in 20 years. It was 14% bigger and about 30% brighter than usual. I did my usual research about possible locations in the week leading to the Full Moon. I found one promising location but Saturday was an extremely foggy day here in the San Francisco Bay. I had made up my mind that it was not worth going, until late Sunday afternoon, when a friend of mine sent me this text: “Moon shoot tonight?”. He lives in San Francisco so he had direct information that our friend Karl (see Karl the fog) was not coming over. I drove quickly (but safely) to San Francisco to meet my friend and we went to my planned location. I knew I would not see when the Moon exactly rises over the horizon because of...

Last night, it was going to be full and to rise above the North tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. After looking at the moon position, I did conclude that the moon would be aligned with the top of the tower with the Transamerica tower in the middle of the opening. The image above shows what my vision was. A very unusual hot weather is in effect in San Francisco right now, which meant that it was still in 70s at 9pm last night and there was no chance of fog and clouds to block the view of the moon. The combination of those factors had attracted a large number of photographers on the Marin Headlands, literally I was waiting for moonrise with 12 other photographers. Taking pictures of the moon is a bit tricky. First the moon moves quickly in the sky. Second there is a...