Field notes · Winter

Winter Moon

The clearest nights are the coldest. Notes from an hour on the roof with a long lens.

Crescent moon in a black night sky — Photograph by Xavier McLaren

January, minus eight, and the sky so clear the moon had edges. I took the long lens up to the roof, balanced it on the parapet and photographed the same crescent for an hour while it climbed.

A moon is the easiest picture and the hardest. Easy because it is there every month; hard because every photograph of it looks like every other, unless the night gives you something the last one did not.

Cold hands

The frame is the last one, when the moon had cleared the aerials and the sky had gone properly black. The rest of the hour is in the drawer.

Crescent moon hanging in a dark starry sky above a thin band of cloud — The same crescent in April, with the cloud that made a different picture. Photograph by Pascal Debrunner.

What January gave was the black: no haze, no glow from the town, nothing between the lens and the moon but cold air. The picture is the black as much as the crescent.

Cold hands

Comments