The above photo surprised even me. Photographically speaking I’ve always used the moon as the bridesmaid but never the bride. But on this particular night in Big Bend, the moon seemed overwhelmingly bright and deserving of exclusive attention.
At the time I thought that being hundreds of miles from civilization must have had an impact on the results. But I have since captured similarly excellent photographs of the moon while in the city. I have realized that this first time of specifically focusing on the moon (no pun intended) was really about what was not present. You see, being hundreds of miles from civilization—buildings, traffic, noise, city lights, etc., etc.—had an impact on me rather than the photography. When there is nothing but celestial bodies lighting the slience of a seemingly empty and endless desert plain, you experience things in an entirely different way.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 1.25 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.