It’s another Saturday night, and I’m just trying to get everything done in my life. I’m one week away from the National Basketball League of Canada starting another season, and eight teams are counting on me to provide statistics and other important information. I also have to get other projects done, and I just drove back to the Town and Village for a good night’s sleep.
Oh look, the moon is almost full out there…
Wait a second. What’s that around the moon? It looks like a ring of some sort, a light white ring encircling the moon.
Well, it is a cloudy evening, perhaps there’s some refraction in the clouds from the moonlight. Not much moonlight here, barely enough to make a vampire sparkle.
Okay, I gotta get a picture of this.
Nikon D700 at the ready. Which lens to use, which lens to use… I grabbed my Kiev 20H fisheye lens and strapped everything to the tripod.
After a few test shots, I snagged this.
Apparently what I captured was something called the 22° halo, in which light is refracted from the clouds in the sky. It’s more common for this type of halo to be associated with the sun, but it also occurs at night as a full moon fights through the cloud cover.
So I caught this picture. Now what do I do with it?
Well, it’s not what I plan to do with it – it’s the step I took in taking this picture.
Normally, when I use my D700, I’ll shoot so that the camera takes two pictures – a RAW (.NEF format) image and a JPG image. I’ve usually saved the RAW file for working in Lightroom, while using the JPG files in Corel Photo-Paint 9.
This time, I decided to forego shooting in both formats, and instead took the pictures in Nikon’s RAW format only. This is a big step for me. This means that I’m now trusting that I can take the RAW picture, which is essentially a digital “negative” of the image I shot, and use software to enhance the picture, to adjust color levels, to “tweak” it to look more aesthetically pleasing.
One step at a time. Each step is a learning experience, and each experience will give me the opportunity to improve my skills.
And if I can stop and take a picture of a halo-encircled moon… and capture that halo…
That’s fine by me.
Chuck The Writer 
CHUCK.
I saw this last night and it actually made me think the world was truly ending. I thought it was a planet coming through the moon and we were done for it. This is what happens when I see movies like “Melancholia” — check that out if you haven’t.
Glad you got a shot of this though, and other people saw it (and I’m not crazy!).
I also wanted to note that I just reread your “In Defense of Zan Strumfeld” bit (http://blog.timesunion.com/chuckmiller/in-defense-of-zan-strumfeld/5549/#comments) and again, thank you. One line — “Don’t ever sacrifice quality for quantity” is how I try to live my life constantly. I just wanted to thank you for being so kind, and giving thoughtful and well-written advice. It was very out of the blue and wonderful.
You may have figured out I’m not longer blogging. I got a job at a local newspaper and stopped blogging (also, I graduated college, and the blog was about college). I hope to be back one day though, I truly miss it.
Started my own personal blog about my rants as a pseudo-Luddite: http://zanecdotes.tumblr.com/page/2.
Keep up the posts. You rock.
Zan Strumfeld
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