What Could Have Been.

On Monday afternoon I headed to my friend Dan's house to pick him up before heading downtown to shoot the full moon rising over downtown Dallas. The day had been mostly sunny and was still that way when I left my house. When I arrived at Dan's house about 4:15 I noticed that some clouds were moving in. Actually it was a pretty solid wall of clouds. Twenty minutes later we arrived at our shooting location near downtown. It was almost totally cloudy now and it would soon block out the eastern horizon. So much for seeing the moon rise at 5:15! I couldn't believe this last minute sudden change in the weather was going to cheat us out of what we came here to shoot. Knowing it didn't look to good we still decided to get out our equipment and hike down the Trinity River levee to where we had planned to shoot. The overcast skies made for some pretty flat light, but you never know.
 I had brought along two tripods. My plan was to set up a camera on one of them shooting a time lapse while I did stills using the other tripod. This was my first attempt at time lapse so that was another reason I was so bummed out about the weather change. I went ahead and set things up even though it wasn't looking too promising. Well, we never photographed the moon and the sun did not find a last minute hole in the western sky for a surprise sunset. The light did start looking better as it started to get dark and the lights of downtown started coming on. I left off the first half of the time lapse I shot because the light was so pitiful, but the second half isn't too bad. It was fun to try something I had not done before. It was also a challenging first effort with the light changing so much from start to finish. I did get a nice still image of downtown using my 180mm macro lens.

After we finished shooting we gathered our equipment and hiked back to the car. It was starting to look like the cloud cover was breaking up. We loaded the vehicle and shut its rear door. I looked up and saw the moon come out from behind the clouds but it was totally dark and the moon was way too high in the sky now.  We got in the car and headed out to get some dinner.