A Keepsake From Lake City

Sometimes, the best nature photos aren’t the ones right in front of your face. When shooting this photo, I was watching the sun go down behind the mountains, then I looked behind me – this is something you always should do when taking nature photos. When I turned, I saw this beautiful moon and a single cloud making its way toward it. The cloud was turning red from the late sunlight.

INFOBOX

Making the picture

Location

Windy Point, just south of Lake City on Colorado 149.

The challenge

Getting the moon and cloud in focus and exposed correctly.

The solution

To get enough depth of field (area of the photo that is in focus) to cover the distance between the cloud and moon, I shot an f-stop of 16 and used a shutter speed of 125, which was fast enough to stop the movement of the moon. The light on the cloud and the moon was pretty much the same, so the moon’s detail showed up.

Gear

Nikon D1-H digital camera and a 500-millimeter lens on a tripod. ASA was 400.