Photographing the Crescent Moon During Blue Hour
My family, friends, and even other photographers give me a hard time about the hours I keep for this. Why get up so early? For the light. For the colors. For the chance to watch one of nature’s better shows before anyone else is even awake.
Photographs made during blue hour have a look you can’t really fake, and there’s no better stretch of coast for it than right here in the Ocean State. Rocky Point — the old, abandoned amusement park in Warwick, a few minutes from my house — shows up in my work again and again for exactly that reason.
So what actually is “blue hour”? It’s that stretch of time before sunrise when the sky fills with rich color as the light bounces off the underside of the clouds. To me, it’s the best hour of the day to be standing out there with a camera.
I spend a lot of time exploring the beaches along the east side of Narragansett Bay looking for the next composition, and the old Rocky Point pier is always near the top of the list. For this one, I went as wide as I could to try to capture just how big the ocean and sky feel out there before sunrise.
“Under the Crescent Moon” is one of the Rocky Point Pier photographs available as a print — you can see it and the sizing options here: Rocky Point Pier, fine art print.