We Interupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programing

I still have some California material I want to post but this is worth a diversion. There was a full moon rise last evening. This was taken from my office window. The territory in the foreground is East St. Louis, Illinois. The Mississippi is just off the bottom of the frame. Although it was cloudless the air wasn't exactly clear. Wish the moon were sharper.   

We Didn't Get The Eclipse In North America

But we did get this. Rise of the mid-summer full moon, Webster Groves, Missouri, 27 July 2018, about 8:50 PM.

What I Could Get Of The Supermoon

I set up my tripod under the Arch beside the Mississippi, letting whatever emanates from the giant steel wicket penetrate my brain and camera. 5:11 PM, 66 degrees, the tables said. The day had turned from clear to hazy and, as the sky darkened, I could not tell how much cloud touched the eastern horizon.

Time passed and I was impatient. Finally, a dirty yellow light rose over Eads Bridge. The full moon was indistinct, wrapped in haze. This was the best I could do. A few minutes later it was completely covered in cloud.

Before I left I turned my lens across the river. Lots of gambling going on in and around this town.

The clouds pulled back as I got home to Webster Groves, more about which tomorrow.   

CDP Monthly Theme Day: My Street

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My street is, to be frank, a little dull.  It's nice enough, well lined with trees and neat suburban homes, but has nothing to distinguish it. So, rather than posting a photo of the pavement and buildings, I thought I'd use an image of what hung directly over the end of the street on Wednesday evening.

It was the night of the full moon, of course. When I came home from work this was hanging low in the sky over the November-bare trees. It was worth setting up my tripod in the chilly air, trying every possible exposure combination. Per aspera ad astra.

By the way, that's Jupiter in the upper left.


View all the other City Daily Photo members' takes on their own streets here. 

December Theme Day: Waiting

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Well, just an interpretation. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants. Your results may vary.

BONUS PHOTO (BELOW): downtown St. Louis under the full moon last night.

TOMORROW: back to Big Cheezy.

Thursday Arch Series

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Full moon back on Halloween. Werewolves prowl the banks of the Mississippi.

La Lune Silencieuse

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The title is in fancy-pants French because yesterday's was, too. VJ gets it.Tuesday's moon photo was loud and brassy. Today's is quiet.

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW: Siegfried's Death, from the opera of the same character's name. Despair and the lasting memory of triumph all within a few minutes. Wagner was a jerk but his art is transcendent.

TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series and another new Arch photo on Gateway.

Clare de Lune, Or, Why I Love My New Camera Body

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The photo above and this well-known tune by Claude Debussy are the reasons for the horrible attempt at a joke in Monday's "Tomorrow" blurb. However, it was also a technical experiment.

I scored a Canon 5D Mark II last month and I want to tell you, I am smitten. Its highest resolution RAW file gives you an image of astonishing clarity, weighing in at 21 MB a shot. So, on Sunday night, I went down to the riverfront to shoot the rising full moon.

Photographing the moon well isn't easy, so I read up on it. The advice I found was conflicting. This picture was shot at ISO 400, f 16, 1/20th sec. I used spot light metering and mirror lock-up. Of course, the camera was on a tripod and I used a shutter cable release, all to minimize vibration. My longest lens is Canon's 100-400 mm L series, so I used it at max extension. It's not nearly long enough. The image you see above it perhaps five percent of the original shot, a very tight crop. It's not perfectly sharp but not bad IMHO. Pretty good camera.

WHAT I ORDERED FROM AMAZON: some orchestral excerpts from Wagner operas. The St. Louis Symphony had an opera-oriented program last weekend, ending with four selections from the Ring cycle. It swings from bliss to despair to heart-pounding majesty.

TOMORROW: more lunacy, perhaps.


There is a new Arch photo today on Gateway,
also shot on Sunday night.

Moonrise on Mississippi

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We had our firm's holiday dinner at a hotel by the river last night. I had to take a detour down to the levee when I saw the full moon rising over the Mississippi. This shot was handheld at ISO 3200 but I need to get up a post this morning. We stayed downtown overnight and got a room with a view of the riverfront.

Did I say something in yesterday's post about the possibility of paralegals behaving badly at the office holiday party? This pair isn't too bad. The woman on the left has been my partner's paralegal for 23 years and her sister for a lot longer than that. The one on the right has been my paralegal for 26 years. Her husband just passed his 20th anniversary as one of the lawyers in our firm. It was an office romance. The story is that when we hired him we gave him a good salary and threw in a woman as a signing bonus. We're just one big family.


TOMORROW: The STL DPB Second Annual...
You'll have to come back to find out.