The Sky's The Limit

Point Your Camera Up, Up And Away

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

This is a rare shot because it's not often you get the waning moon and the rising sun in the same frame, on a completely cloudless morning. I actually posted this photograph on my blog a year ago, with the post title Jose Can You See, By Dawn’s Yearly Light. At the time, I had just started posting every day and I was only getting about eight or ten hits on a good day, so I’m reproducing it here as a special response for Annie and Wendy.

You can see the three-quarter moon in the top left-hand quadrant of this shot. But 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.

As I said when I first posted this image, it 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 extremely lucky, because it was a cloudless morning, one of those crisp early spring days with a touch of frost.

How lucky was I? Let me explain. 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. So, work it out mathematically. This shot is only possible on 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 this time, with a Sigma 18-125 lens on my Pentax K100D, I was blessed with the trifecta (no cloud at all and the waning moon and the rising sun) - hey, how lucky could I get?