Have you been wondering about the intriguing subject I mentioned at the end of my last blog post?

We were on our way back from the IAHE convention in Indiana, driving east through Ohio. We had enjoyed a visit with friends over a delicious and filling meal. We made our necessary stops for feeding the baby and gassing up the car, and now we were steadily covering the miles toward home while Mordecai lay snuggled in his car seat, fast asleep. Behind us, the sun dropped low into a puddle of yellow gold. We crested the hill and there it was, right in front of us: a giant, beautiful, golden moon hanging on the horizon. We both gasped at its beauty and I thought how wonderful it would be to photograph! Technically there was no deadline for getting home. We just had to get home, eventually. I took the nearest exit and pulled into a gas station parking lot. Before grabbing my camera, I stole a quick look at Google Maps. Just up the road was a big patch of green. I looked at Julianna. “Would you mind if we explore, just a little bit?” She smiled. I turned the car around and we headed down the road a little further. It would be a quick detour. Surely it wouldn’t add that much time to our trip.

And that is how we discovered a fascinating historic place called Carriage Hill Metro Park. We followed the long road leading away from busy urban surroundings into lovely meadows with riding trails. We passed a lovely little pond with picnic areas and swings overlooking the water. Up around the bend we saw a pristinely kept farmhouse with barns and rough-cut post-and-rail fences. There were horses and cows and goats and signage telling us this was an old historic farm and museum. The park closed at 8pm, in literally less than 15 minutes, so I didn’t take the time to snap any photos on my phone of the place. Instead I kept looking for a vantage point of the moon. It would have been perfect if the buildings could have been included in a shot, but they were all on the wrong side of the road. Plus, I was having a hard time even finding the moon. I think clouds were covering it up because, after turning around to head back to the main road, we saw it hanging in the sky at a place we had passed. I pulled into the Cedar Lake parking lot and asked Julianna to run and sit on the swing. The moon was now rising up through the treetops.

Sadly, the various elements in the composition didn’t line up well, regardless of how I approached the scene. I could not get enough separation between the swing and the background to make the subject stand out!

(Later, when editing the photo, I adjusted things to make it look more like it night time, so I think that helps.)

But hoping for something better, I asked Julianna to stand in a different spot where the moon was clear of the trees. I also switched to a telephoto lens so that the moon would appear larger, and ran a bracket of shots from off a tripod.

Here is the one shot of the bunch that I decided to process. The raw file provided just enough information in the moon to bring back the detail in it.

Edited:

Kinda neat! Even though it didn’t appear nearly this dark in real life, the exposure difference between the moon and the earth was increasing dramatically. It was time to go. More photos would require more time to set up and more time to edit it post (merging multiple exposures, etc.). And by now, it was 8pm so we had to leave.

Before we left, I saved the park in my list of nice locations for photography. Who knows, maybe we’ll go back next time we are driving I70 past Dayton. Not every green spot you see on Google Maps turns out to be pretty, but this one ended up being pretty good. You never know what you might find close to the beaten path! And sometimes, what you find can hold some surprises . . . like the next park we found in Kentucky a week and a half later, this time right off I24. Heading south for the April 8 total solar eclipse photography workshop in Texas, I noticed a “Vista Ridge Park” on Google Maps. It sounded promising. But what we found there was something we totally did not expect to see in Kentucky! But I’ll have to tell you about that in another blog post some other time.

Until then, don’t miss the little unexpected opportunities God brings your way!