Painter
What do you do if you’re a face painter and there’s no one about who wants one? Paint yourself. I guess it’s obvious. She’s good but I didn’t want my face painted.
Supermoon
Brighter and bigger. Who could tell. but it is closer now than it has been and will be for many years.
David put me onto this shot. It’s not often that the moon is this close to the earth. It amounts to about a diameter of the earth closer than usual, 222,000 miles. The last time we were this close was 1993. Since the moon is more than 30 diameters away, this distance is not a lot. That 12 percent size different can mean as much as a 30 percent change in the brightness, so this will be a particularly bright supermoon.
So as a casual photographer, what could I do but shoot the moon when I saw it while driving home. To be sure, it was shining bright and true over the skies of Saudi Arabia. No clouds. It was bright and sunny today – a mere 106 degrees. It rained for 10 minutes this past year. But, still, there is humidity. Even so, tonight there was little haze. So I took out the super zoom to the tune of evening prayer from the speakers of the nearby mosques. Two mosques compete with one another. Illiterate as I am, I simply tune out the noise. (See years of (wife) complaints.)
First, when you shoot the moon, remember you are shooting into a daylight (sunlit) object), which means that your exposure is near to daytime. I used 1/1600 sec at f9. And I put on the big lens – 400mm. It would be nice to use a tripod. But I don’t happen to have one at the moment. At 1/1600 it’s pretty forgiving even handheld in the middle of the night. And to dispel another myth, I shot the image below through my screen window. The sharpness is acceptable. After setting up the exposure, I took myself outside and made the image above. The only manipulation was to crop and center.
I am reminded of that Disney song about seeing the same moon in the same sky even though we are a hemisphere apart. Thanks Dave, this shot is for you. 
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