Sometimes I can see the weather starting to bring all the pieces together for a dramatic sunset and this evening was one such instance. I noticed some cool clouds covering most of the sky except toward the horizon where it was a mix of clear and some cloud streaks. This scenario is what you look for in the hopes the setting sun lights the whole cloudy sky dramatically. Now to the tunnel vision, I set my tripod up in a field way to the right of this image viewpoint and was looking directly at the setting sun behind the farm. Things were getting better and better and I was fixated on the developing shot before me when all of a sudden I noticed the grass being illuminated by the sun and the sky was looking nice as well. I left my tripod set up and ran to get a second camera to capture this fleeting moment which reminds me of a painting. I did get my shot from the original spot and it is nice, but the sunset never really reached its full potential and that’s how it goes sometimes.

I found this field of mustard the other weekend and the first shots I did were looking the opposite direction during daytime. I knew a Supermoon was coming in the next few days so I used an app called the photographers ephemeris that shows you any location you enter and where Sunrise, Sunset, Moonrise and Moonset will happen within that location. I entered the address here and it showed the moon rising right behind the barns. I was eager to arrive and get my shot composed before the moon began to appear. Now even though you have a good idea where it will appear, I find it hard to get an exact pinpoint location on site instead of looking at the app. I started out much farther to the left and kept waiting and waiting and finally walked along the fence to see if it was possibly rising behind the barn and sure enough, that was the case. One very important factor in getting these shots is the balance between when the sun is setting and the moon is rising. On this evening the moon was rising about 15 minutes before the sun was setting and this helps greatly by allowing the ambient light to be extremely close to the bright moon. By doing this exact shot the next day, you would be looking at the moon rising under pitch black skies a couple hours later. The other thing I see are gigantic moons in scenes that are obviously not where the moon was. The only way to make the moon look very large in relation to the subject naturally is to find a subject at a great distance from the camera and by using a strong telephoto you can compress things and make the moon look huge in the background.