Day 43 – Full Moon At Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

I was addicted to full moon photography. OK, maybe that was exaggeration. I can only do this maximum 12 times a year (except we always have blue moon).

In order to photograph full moon, we drove all the way back to Wyoming again (1.5 hours away from Deadwood, SD where we stay right now). I’ve never seen Devil’s Tower and didn’t know whether I could find a high point to photograph full moon. So it was a gamble!

Day 43 - Full Moon at Devil's Tower WY-005.jpg

Before we reached Devil’s Tower, I was already scouting out all the back up spots. Alas, time is everything when it comes to full moon photography. Finally, we found a small cliff (after climbing over a fence like a clumsy bear) to set my tripod. The sun behind us was setting almost to the horizon, leaving a stream of golden red on the cliff in front of me.

The moon made its debut appearance at around 7:11pm, almost 20 minutes after the moonrise hour. Only five minutes afterwards, the moon climbed behind a thick layer of cloud. Yikes! I had to take a break and turned around. WOW! I saw the Devil’s Tower in the golden horizon.

I ran back to the fence I climbed earlier, and set my camera directly on a fence and took 3 shots for this HDR (0.5 sec, 4 sec and 30 sec). So this is one of the very few HDRs I haven’t used a tripod. I didn’t remember how I held my breath for the last 30 second shot, but the result wasn’t too shabby. See following HDR image straight from the camera unprocessed.

Day 43 - Full Moon at Devil's Tower WY-007.jpg

Indeed, photography is all about experimenting. You never know when it’ll be your best or worst moment. In this case, it certainly wasn’t the latter. :-)

Last but not least, a photo of the messy-looking photographer feeling abundance of joy!