For those who may not have heard, I broke my left foot a few weeks ago (very lame story) and was sure that, with the coming of Winter, I would hang up the camera for a 4 week hiatus.  I continued to post photos taken from immediately prior to the accident but felt there was no way I would make it out for anything new and exciting.

On Monday, December 16, my wife texted me while I was at work commenting on how incredible the moon had appeared that night.  I had totally forgotten about the full moon (not that I could do much about it from work).  I did pull out the iPhone and tracked the expected moonset location and then checked the weather forecast which called for a low of 8 F on Tuesday morning.  That temp offered the promise of possible sea smoke and I couldn’t pass up the chance to capture the Cold Moon (the given name to the December full moon) near Abbot Hall WITH sea smoke in the harbor!

I woke early the next morning, put on some cold weather gear as well as a new cast shoe that closed over my toes and offered traction.  I started off at Chandler Hovey Park but the sea smoke only appeared as a fine wisp of fog on the distant waters and the angles weren’t what I had hoped for.  I quickly drove over to Foster Street and found the pier belonging to the Eastern free of ice.  I carefully made my way down and began capturing images of the full Cold moon setting just to the right of Abbot Hall and with a great spill of light onto the now empty Marblehead harbor.

Unfortunately, the sun had not risen enough to light up the foreground and balance the strong light of the moon.  I ended up bracketing my shots (taking a ‘normal’ exposure and then up to 3 extra exposures on either end of it to capture the full spectrum of light).  This was my favorite composition of the set and I spent a little more than one hour carefully blending each exposure by hand to bring out the details in the moon while keeping the scene natural and balanced.  The final image is composed of 3 exposures for the moon, 1 exposure for the harbor and a separate exposure for Abbot Hall and the houses.  I also took the time to remove all of the empty buoys from the harbor.  The end result is an image which represents how I viewed the scene before me on this early Tuesday morning.

This will be the last photo I share in 2013.  Coming up on my Facebook page, I’ll be looking for a bit of help deciding on my Top 13 of 2013 images and have my annual slideshow to share for the New Year.  I may share it a bit before New Year’s Day but am not sure if it will be finalized by then.  Stay tuned!