Anyone that follows me on twitter, facebook or flickr knows that recently I started taking part in one of the many daily photography regimes designed to get people out and shooting, dailyshoot.com. Each day a new assignment is posted to their site and other than that, it is wide open. You can interpret their short instructions however you see fit. The point is to get out and take pictures every day. There are no judges (other than myself) or scores or anything like that. You take your photo and post it on one of the supported photo sharing sites (such as flickr) then tweet a link to @dailyshoot. Their script picks up the link and adds it to the set for that day’s assignment.

Make a photograph that incorporates a circle.

I looked forward to my trip to New Zealand for many, many, many reasons. One of those reasons was that rural areas of the south island are some of the least light polluted in the world thanks to the low population density and fact that it is an island in the middle of a vast ocean. I wanted to take star trail photos. And since I was going to be there for almost a month, I would be there for a new moon, which is the idea condition.

The weather, however, had different plans. Still, I did get a few nights of clear skies.

The first of my clear nights occurred while I was in Hamner. Lewis pass is about an hour back towards the west coast so I headed there to take some star photos.

This year’s Lindyfest in Houston was the best yet despite my initially ho-hum attitude about classes. The instructor lineup, as always, was awesome and with live music from Jonathan Stout and his Campus Five, featuring in Hilary Alexander the social dancing was to die for. My plan this year was to only do a few classes and try to enjoy as much social dancing as possible while actually getting sleep. Anyone that has attended Lindyfest (or any of the other big lindy exchange/camps) knows that it is basically an endurance challenge. If you go to all the classes and stay even remotely long at the social dances (say until only 3:00AM) you end up getting about 4 hours a sleep a night to support 12 to 16 hours of intense exercise.  Photographically I was prepared to be frustrated. My D700 was still at Nikon being repaired after a rough time in New Zealand so I was using my D5000 which doesn’t have very good low light performance compared to the D700.

Showing off in the jam circle: Cool... Showing off in the jam circle with a sleeping infant hanging from your chest: Beyond Awesome.

There has been a bunch of hype about the “super moon” in the last few days. Of course, most of the speculation about the moon’s affect on earthly events is non-sense. About the only thing that is actually true is that the moon appears about 14% larger than when it is at the other extreme, and larger than it does at just about any other time. Since everyone made a big deal about this lots of people, myself included, went out and took pictures of the moon over the last couple of days as it moved through full. Of course, any full moon would have done just as well.

This is the moon 2 days prior to the full moon when we had nice clear skies.