You probably recognize this location from either the previous blog post or possibly some other images on my flickr site. This was taken about five minutes before the image in the previous post. I was ready to head back to bed (three hours sleep isn’t quite enough) but turned around to see the moon beginning to shine though the clouds.

What I hoped was that the initial appearance of the moon was signaling a parting of the thick cloud cover and that in its wake would be an evenly dispersed layer of fast moving altocumulus clouds (yeah, right!) the results of which, when backlit by the moon, are seen in this image from Gasworks Park in Seattle in 2006. However, that night at Gasworks Park in 2006 was and still is the only time I have been so lucky.

I’m not complaining, however, because during the minute or so that the moon did appear I captured the only image I have captured thus far in which the moon looks like a comet shooting across the sky (thanks to those that pointed that out!)

Yachats, Oregon, is about a six hour drive from Seattle and if you get full cooperation from the clouds, the tides, the moon, etc, it’s worth every minute of it. But as rare as the confluence of naturally occurring factors is, it’s even more rare to see me up at five in the morning - I like to do the night photography thing before going to bed.

The sun was set to rise at 7:30AM and the moon would set at 10:30AM so the moon would still be high in the sky around 5:00AM and would be bright enough to back-light the clouds. The clouds turned out to be a little thicker than I hoped but there was still enough light to provide backing to the clouds and also to squeeze in a couple night photography hours before the sun rose.

This is three 90 second exposures at ISO 400 averaged to reduce noise. Shorter, averaged exposures are often a better option on the coast because you never know (if you’re close enough) when you’ll have to grab everything and run to get out of the way of the ocean. It’s better in my opinion to use a higher ISO and stack/average n well exposed images to improve the quality of a “good” exposure than to try one really long exposure at the lowest ISO that only lasts half as long as it needs to. A single image at ISO 400 using the “expose to the right” technique will be better than an under-exposed ISO 100 exposure pushed two stops to match.