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.