Moonset at Yaquina

This is winter at Yaquina Head, early morning. The moon was setting in the western sky as the sun came up behind me. The light on the lighthouse is from the sunrise. The blue of the sky is the specific blue you only get in the minutes before full daylight, when the atmosphere has all the color in it but the sun hasn't yet washed it out. I've made a lot of photographs of this lighthouse. Some of them are dramatic. This one isn't trying to be. It's a clean composition, a moment that lasted maybe four minutes, a quiet morning in a place I know well enough that I no longer need it to surprise me to know that it's worth photographing. The wind that morning was real. The cold was real. The chance that the marine layer would roll in and cancel the whole thing was real, and it almost did — there's a band of cloud just visible at the horizon that nearly took the moon. But it held off long enough.