Aligned

The April supermoon is one of the largest moons of the year. From a specific viewpoint near Yaquina Head, when the geometry is right, the moon rises into a position just above the top of the lighthouse. I had been trying to make this photograph since I'd first calculated the angle and the date. Every year, the marine layer rolled in. Every year, I got up at four in the morning, drove out to the viewpoint, set up in the cold, waited for the moonrise, and watched a wall of gray cloud cover the entire eastern sky exactly at the moment the moon was supposed to appear. Five years in a row. The year I made this photograph, I checked the sky the night before. Clear. I checked again at three in the morning. Still clear. I drove out, set up, and waited. The moon came up. It found its position above the lighthouse. The lighthouse was lit from within. The sky behind it was the specific cold purple. The composition I'd been waiting five years to make existed for about three minutes, and then the moon kept moving, and the light shifted, and it was over. I shot it with a 500mm lens, wide open. Long-lens compression to make the moon read as large as it actually was. No compositing, no stacking, no cheating — one frame, one moment. It's not my best-selling print. It's far from it. But I love it more than most of them. Some photographs are about luck. This one was about showing up five times to a place where I might not get anything, until the morning I did.