Moonlit path

This is from a couple of weeks ago on the beach during full moon.

Somewhere in the vaults of my mind is a plot for a book which involved following the path of light cast by the moon out of an enclosed bay to adventure. I got as far as mapping the enclosed bay, and doing some notes on the society in there, plus some plot lines, but to be honest, if you strip out all the decoration, the plot wasn’t dissimilar to what Neil Gaiman wrote in Stardust, one of the standard “boy goes to seek his fortune, meets girl, winds up in love” type things. Somehow, when boys are the main characters, they don’t count as romances….Anyway, somehow,  after that, I somehow left the book aside and started taking photographs instead. Maybe for the winter I’ll have a go at it again. When I used to live in Portmarnock, any time there was any bit of moonlight at all, I used to go out, just to have a look at the line of light on the water.

For a long time I’ve spent time figuring out how to take photographs of the moon that are…a little different from the normal. I mean, there are only so many different places you can position a ball of light in a dark sky, let’s be honest:

I must have a few dozen variations on this theme taken with different lenses etc etc. About my favourite of all the moon shots is this one:

which was from a partial eclipse a while ago. The picture was taken when I knew a lot less about photography than I do now.I tend to wind up with a far darker sky than I desire.

Anyway, every so often (like, every day) someone else goes and takes a picture where I think “I wish I’d seen that”. Here’s Richard’s from the same night the top photograph was taken.