Short Stories

Last Moon of 2022.

Late last year, I picked up a book called the “Photographer’s Playbook.” It’s a pretty substantial tome, and I like to think of it as a “workbook” full of ideas from other photographers that help to practice the skills associated with good photography.

One of the ideas was an invitation to photograph the moon, once a day for 30 days. When complete, I’m supposed to study the photographs and discern something about my style or skills. The book provides a list of questions to consider while doing so.

I took these pictures of the last moon of 2022. I started on December 30th, and made it about 12 days, not including days where storms or clouds completely obscured the moon.

I learned some interesting things.

While I spent the first few days getting outside at the right time to photograph the moon, I wasn’t able to sustain the project and photograph all 30 days of the last moon of 2022. I missed a couple days because of the weather – storms obscuring the moon. And I ultimately just stopped photographing the moon, and moved on to other work.

That felt odd to me.

I actually prefer projects that study a particular subject through a series of images as opposed to single photographs of a subject. Since June 2022, I have been posting near daily photos to a project on my blog called “The Story We Tell,” and to my living portfolio on Instagram (“Arkansas Today”). Truth be told, I couldn’t sustain interest in the moon for 30 days; I’ve actually been working on another project that is far more interesting to me right now, so I’ll come back to the moon later.

But I did learn a couple things.

By consciously choosing to use my Sony RX100 mk3 for this project (I didn’t want to be tempted to create a 30-day series of moon closeups using a bigger lens) I learned more about composing photos in the dark or in dim lighting.

And I reminded myself, as I discuss in the caption of the last photo, that the only thing that blocks my creativity is me.

Click on the first photo to see the complete photos in gallery format.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.