If my first post in this series had a theme then perhaps it was winter. So if this one has a theme then it might be mountains. I drove past the above scene many times in April and May, as I have done in years past as well. Whenever the sun rose and the light hit the clouds and mountains, I always thought how great it would be to have elk or deer on a ridge in front of the mountains. This past April, it happened. And it happened on a morning when the light was pretty stunning. The elk were on the move already, so I didn’t have a lot of time to set up. The elk only stayed on the ridge for a few short minutes and I was able to get only a handful of photos, but I only needed one. This was one of those moments were I still had the rest of the morning ahead to photograph but knew if I didn’t take another shot, the day was already a success.

Besides admiring it when it looked pretty, I never really paid much attention to the moon, especially as a photo subject, until this year. I’ve been photographing it in the night sky quite a bit, trying to get as much detail in the moon’s surface as I can. But I also used it as part of a scene quite often too. In the photo above, a single image photographed with a telephoto zoom lens, the morning light made the mountains glow as the moon slowly retreated towards the horizon. While often when a scene like this is presented, it might be a composite of two photos, one of the moon and one of the mountains, this, as mentioned was a single photo, which made it special. I personally don’t like composites of the moon like that, so I was pleased to be able to find a scene like this that worked at such a long focal length so it all came together.