Thursday, September 21, 2006

Jose, Can You See ...

(By Dawn's Yearly Light)


Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

This is a really rare shot because it's not often you get the waning moon and the rising sun in the same frame.

You can see the three-quarter moon in the top left-hand quadrant of this shot. I don't need to tell you where the sun is. But you can see that the sun is actually 180 degrees away, completely out of the picture. What you see is merely the reflection of the rising sun on the glass exterior of one of the buildings that makes up this segment of Melbourne's skyline.

This image, shot with a Pentax K100 digital SLR, has not been enhanced in any way. What you see is what I shot. Simple as that.

The colours and tones that you see here are exactly the colours and tones I saw through the lens.

I was just lucky, because it was a cloudless morning, one of those crispy early spring morning when there has been a touch of frost. And you have to take into account one critical element - given the gradually changing position of the sun through the year, there are only about seven or eight days annually where the sunrise is wholly reflected in the windows of this building.

Work it out mathematically. A maximum of eight days out of 365. That's a minuscule window of opportunity. But then you have to take into account the rapidly diminishing probability that you'll see the moon at the same time. Low cloud or even scattered cloud generally obscures the moon at sunrise.

But I was blessed with the trifecta (no cloud at all AND the waning moon AND the rising sun) - hey, how lucky could I get?

2 comments:

Fletch said...

Good one!

I would not presume to comment further on such excellence.

david mcmahon said...

Thanks for the kind words, Terry. I'd just say I was lucky - in the right place at the right time. That said, it would have to be among my ten favourites, I guess.