Full Moon Silhouettes by Mark Gee

Today is my brother Charlie's birthday. Happy Birthday Charlie!

It's also a date that getting more and more significant as I get older. I swear I was in my twenties before I even realized that the days are shorter during some periods of the year and longer during others. I guess I never questioned daylight. It just was what it was.

Now I just love the long days and, more and more, dread the short ones. Tonight it was light until nine and twilight stayed for an hour. I went driving in the convertible, top down, along River Drive, flood plain to my left (no buildings). And a gibbous moon. Just beginning to get coolish after a warm day. Dusk falling. Lights beginning to come on in houses here and there. Lovely.

Speaking of lovely—in honor of the seasons and the circling, tilting planets, a lovely video by Mark Gee, who captured moonrise in real time over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. (Read more about how he did it at Vimeo.) Music by Dan Phillipson. Watch it full screen if you can.

Full Moon Silhouettes from Mark Gee on Vimeo.

Not directly relevant to the date, I suppose, but it does seem apropos. Thanks to Walter Glover, who sent me the link to this.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Peter Marquis-Kyle: "Today is my birthday too. Here in the southern hemisphere it's the shortest day of the year."

Roger Bradbury: "'Full Moon Silhouettes' is a film made from a brilliantly simple idea perfectly executed. Nicely done, Mark.

"It's my sister in law's birthday today too. I sang 'Happy Birthday' to her down the phone this morning. Happy birthday, Jane."

Peter: "Apropos: this weekend is 'Supermoon.'"

Peter Barnes: "Gloat on about the longest day of the year, you Northerners. Guess what day it is down here in the Antipodes? Good news is it's all downhill for the next six months for you lot, while our days just get longer and longer...."

Jim Witkowski: "I thought this day would never end!"

Michael F: "As a landscape photographer, I truly appreciate the short days of winter, and dislike the long days of summer. A 7:00 a.m. winter sunrise is reasonable and civilized; getting up for a 5:30 a.m. summer sunrise is torture."

John: "Oh, no, Mike. Don't mention the convertible. Every time you do, I miss my Mazda Miata too much and find myself checking current lease prices. One day, one day...."

Mike replies: I'm not going to be any help to you there, John. The Miata is wonderful recreation, a great way to get sun and see the countryside, and the most fun you can have on public roads with an automobile without getting arrested. And you can get a decent NB (my favorite) for six or seven grand if you look around and shop carefully. If I can afford it, mine's going to Colorado for a rebuild next winter.

Comments

[Ross Chambers]

My first weeks in Wellington were spent in a flat not very far from Mark's position. While the great perspective that he has achieved was not apparent from a human eye viewpoint the moon over snow covered hills reflected on the harbour was a knock out. A beautiful secret, Wellington. And now I've disclosed it.

[Svein-Frode]

Feel you Mike! Summer solstice has become an increasingly melancolic event over the years. Living in the Arctic I am well aware of the value of daylight, since I hardly see any during winter. Even though we have the complete opposite effect during summer (24 hours of daylight), it doesn't even out. Summer seems to go by in a flash, and winter seems to last forever. Luckily there is TOP to read during winter, so keep up the good work. Looking forward to the book projects!

[Hans Muus]

Beautiful! Especially without the soundtrack - the slow rising of the moon, the dance of the tiny people and the passing of time in general are much more impressive in silence if you ask me. Why and again why do we habitually add piano's and strings to nature shots?

[Michael]

And importantly for us in the Southern Hemisphere, now the days start getting longer :)
We had the coldest morning in 11 years here in Melbourne (Australia).
Leaving for work in the dark, and getting home in the dark, gets old pretty fast!

[Michael Houghton]

"I swear I was in my twenties before I even realized that the days are shorter during some periods of the year and longer during others. I guess I never questioned daylight. It just was what it was."

This is striking to me because my own experience underlines that this is not at all a ridiculous thing to say. I think I was in my late twenties before I really had any significant comprehension of colour.

I mean... I knew that things were coloured, and I am not, thankfully, colourblind, so I can tell colours apart like any other unhindered trichromat, but it's more than that I just had no appreciation of colour; I really didn't notice or really retain that information. (By contrast, sound/music/noise is maybe overrepresented.)

My memories before my late twenties have little colour information in them; my memories afterwards are colourful.

It coincides, of course, with picking up a camera. In particular a digital one, since I started out on digital before a lengthy period with film. Though it was black and white, curiously, that I found most difficult to compose for.

Now, amusingly, people talk about my photographs being full of colour, but I still find I explore the colour more in the resulting photo; at the point of capture I just have a tingling of instinct that the colour combinations are interesting/contrasting/muted et cetera, as if it is another kind of monochrome data.

I conclude that I held myself back by simply not ascribing any value to it at all. The hidden blessing of this late discovery is the extraordinary feeling of stopping to properly look at a scene and experiencing a sudden, quite conscious rush of colour.

[Michael Houghton]

As an aside, I appreciate that the last two paragraphs of my comment are seemingly contradictory. My usual photography subject matter -- loud gigs -- require quick thinking and reaction, rather than long and careful composition, so it is those instincts on which I most rely. Clearly I must engage myself in more of the latter.

[Kevin Bourque]

I love this video. It's planning and execution was WAY harder than it looks.

Us northern hemisphere types will of course notice that the moon is upside down and rising backwards (right to left). How confusing to be in the other hemisphere!

For years a local TV station's morning news program featured a time lapse "sunrise" where the sun was moving right to left. Rather than getting up early and shooting a sunrise, they took a sunset and played it backwards, hoping no one would notice ;-)

[Mark]

First, Happy Birthday to your Brother Charlie. But I digress.

I must take you to task, Mike. Yes, I always appreciate your honesty and the fact you wear your emotions on your sleeve. But you dread the shorter days when it gets dark early? Do you think James Gandolfini, at 51 yrs young, would like to be around to see some short days? Do you think his family would like to share some early moonlit nights with him today?
I have a very close friend who just turned 63. I'm 56. He hates birthdays. Never remembers mine. I always remember his. (It's the same as my daughter's so I have an advantage.) When I call to wish him happy birthday, he's like don't bother, I hate birthdays. Recently his closest friend, a famous songwriter, died at 63, heart attack, totally unexpectedly. I asked my friend if he would rather be dead like his buddy than continue to celebrate birthdays.
No one is promised tomorrow. Enjoy each and every day like it's your last, Mike.

[Richard]

That is magnificent. The man really did his homework on the location and positions. The crowd couldn't have been better scripted. I have never been to the Southern Hemisphere, watching the moon rise from right to left is very different to me.

[Peter Robinson]

Beautiful and very humbling.

[Patrick Perez]

Summer Solstice? This has long day written all over it!

Patrick

[Joe]

Mike,

Happy Summer to you!
Supermoon this weekend
Long warm days and nights
Life is very good indeed.

cheers and beers,
Joe

[gentle lemur]

It's my birthday today too; it's OK for a birthday now that I'm old, but when I was younger I inevitably had an exam on my birthday.
Here in the UK the news is always the same on the 21st of June - strange people do strange things at Stonehenge! Shock! Horror! See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-22999367.

[JPH]

Well, I was well into my twenties, and still believing that wind could only exist if there were clouds in the sky!

Yes, from children's books, and the pictures of clouds, with faces, their cheeks akin to Dizzy Gillespie, and the lines and swirls drawn emanating from their cloud mouths - I embarrassingly admit that I was a good couple years into my twenties, believing that those children's books were just artistically illustrating how wind was created and produced!

I honestly remember one day walking in very windy Cheyenne, Wyoming, and literally stopping in my tracks, feeling the wind upon me, and looking up in utter amazement at the fact that there was not a cloud to be seen in the sky from horizon to horizon! And my thinking, that somewhere, just off the horizon, there must be some monster clouds existing, that are producing such powerful winds, that I here am feeling them so far away under this cloudless sky! :-)

[Mark Alan Miller]

Thank you. That was just splendid. With foggy San Francisco nights I don't get to see many good moonrises, and none as beautiful as that. Somehow even the adults seemed very young against the moon.

[Ross Chambers]

And the day after this subject was posted Wellington and New Zealand had its worst storm for 40 years. The 40 year one beached an inter island ferry the TEV Wahine with the loss of 53 souls (see Wikipedia TEV Wahine).

Hard to keep a long lens steady in that.