Last Wednesday, I was driving with a couple of friends. We turned onto a road that runs along the lakeshore and gasped. An enormous orange moon hung low over the lake, the bottom rim nearly kissing the water. It looked impossible. “I wish we could pull over,” one of my passengers said.
I swerved into a parking lot and stopped in front of a boat launch. We leaped out and raised our phones to capture the perfect moon shot. I wanted some record of this glorious orange orb, this floating jack-o-lantern, this magnificent celestial body, this . . . why am I bothering with all these adjectives when I could just SHOW you what I saw?!
Are you not amazed?
It looks like I covered my phone in plastic wrap and took a picture of a very distant streetlight.
The moon is notoriously difficult to photograph. To state the obvious, it’s very far away. You need an optical zoom lens to get close. The digital zoom on your phone won’t cut it. There’s another problem: the light reflecting off the moon’s surface is bright. And full moons are especially bright, about six times brighter than a half moon. If the camera tries to get the exposure right for the foreground, the moon ends up wildly overexposed. That’s why so many bad moon photos show a featureless glowing blob. And if you manage to get the exposure right so that you can see some of the moons craters, you might not be able to see much else in the photo.
Kenton Fowler, a friend of a friend who picked up photography as a hobby, has been fiddling with moon photos for a couple of years. He finds it “just as frustratingly difficult and challenging as ever.” But he managed to take some phenomenal shots of last week’s Hunter’s Moon. 
This is what my moon photo should have looked like. This is what I saw. This is why I gasped.
My tiny-moon-behind-plastic-wrap shot is approximately my 87th failed attempt at moon photography. I don’t have a single good photo.
I did try once. I took my good camera, a Nikon SLR, and walked down a deserted road in rural Bolivia. I set up a tripod. I used a long exposure. And weeks later, when I finally developed the film, I realized I had a much closer shot of the moon, albeit one that still looked like a white ball floating on a piece of black construction paper.
And I’ll keep trying. There are so many more bad moon photos to come. Just you wait! And I won’t even mind their awfulness. There’s nothing magical about terrible pictures of the moon, but there is something magical in the quest. No matter how cynical I’ve become, no matter how terrible things get, no matter how hopeless I feel, I can still look up and feel awe. I can try to preserve that feeling. One dreadful shot at a time.
***
First image by me. Yup.
Second and third images courtesy of Kenton Fowler
Further Reading:
How to take a picture of the moon that doesn’t look like a tiny, white blob
WTF JUST HAPPENED: WHY CAN’T I TAKE A DECENT PICTURE OF THE MOON?
Those moon shots are beautiful! No matter how many times I experience it, I am rendered speechless by a large, full moon on the horizon. And I have never been able to take a good photo, either.
Haha! Your bad moon photo is 100x better than my truly wretched moon photo. I think I covered my phone with plastic wrap and took a picture of your photo. But I’m so happy to see those amazing shots from your friend!! It was glorious.