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There was an interesting sky as I left the library where the Photographic Society meeting had been taking place.  I often find that the meetings inspire me in some way, but I couldn’t see what I would do with this quite chaotic pink and grey sky.  I remembered that I had been intending re-visiting a location a few minutes from my home where a view of the floodlit twisted spire could be seen with a foreground of interwar houses lining the street.  I saw the view a few months earlier when returning from an earlier CPS meeting and saw the potential when there is light still in the sky, but the with the houses lit by nearby streetlights and the church floodlit.  This evening was as good as any as the sky seemed to be clearing well and there may be a few clouds to add interest.

 So, I picked up my tripod and my camera with the long zoom lens and walked off to the location a couple of streets away.  I was listening on my personal radio to a radio 4 programme featuring Monty Don talking about his view of God and religion etc and I was interested as I find Monty an interesting person.  I arrived at the location with about 10 minutes of the programme still to run and since the view was not as interesting as I thought, with clouds filling the sky behind the church, I didn’t set up the camera until the programme finished.  Even then I thought it would just be a record shot for a later return.  The trees had sprouted leaves, which were obscuring some of the view of the church, so it might be better to re-visit in autumn.

 I set up the tripod and camera, zoomed in to frame the diagonal line of houses with the church approximately in the middle.  As I took the first shot at f8 for a 4 second exposure I noticed a distracting patch of light in the sky to the right of the church spire.  Since the sun had set some 20 minutes earlier it took me a few seconds to realise what the light was.  Then I began to see the shape of the moon coming through the thin clouds.  I was surprised as I wasn’t aware that the moon was full that night and certainly completely unaware of where and when it would be rising.  The moon rose clear of the clouds and shined rosily out and I shot a variety of pictures with different compositions and exposures. 

 Two passing teenage girls wanted to know if I was going to photograph them?  The usual cheeky comment.  I pointed out the moon and one of them at least seemed to think that made sense, though they walked past again later giggling and talking about photographing the moon.  Their loss.

Eventually the moon had risen too far to make a pleasing composition and I moved on to see if I could find any other composition from other viewpoints, but I couldn’t. 

 It was only as I walked through the street back home that I realised just how lucky I had been.  I could have scoured the books on position of the moon, time of moon rise, date of full moon for ages and still not have picked the right night to get the composition which presented itself to me.  I could have picked the right night  for the positioning etc a few times, but found the sky totally obscured by cloud.  Even thinking more about it now, I guess that the particular moonrise position would only happen once this year at a full moon, since the next and previous full moons would be a month further round.  I’ll re-visit next full moon and see how far out I am on this.

 It may sound a bit sentimental, but I couldn’t help feeling my Dad was looking down on me and telling me to go out there to see this sight.  Though I don’t believe in people going to heaven or life after death and that sort of thing.  I had loaded up my Dad’s old Rolliecord camera with a film at the CPS meeting that evening with the hope of using his camera after many years of inactivity for the camera.

 I had had a boring depressing day at work and was beginning to see everything as rather pointless, including my own life, so was feeling quite down and despondent before I went out, so this experience was a real fillip for me.  I am so lucky, so often, time I got out there and made something of all those lucky things which keep happening to me.