Full Moon on the Run

With a full moon rising out of the clouds at 5:00 pm, rush hour dictated the shot. My best opportunity to get the moon relatively unobstructed, and at a time when the camera would pickup detail in the moon, was at I-25 and Martin Luther King Jr. Once I got to where I could photograph the moon at UNM, the buildings were still partially blocking it; by the time we got to the westside, the sun was low enough that the moon showed up as a white disk in the picture. 

You might not think the moon would be a difficult subject, but it is, particularly with digital cameras. Unlike film that will have few details in the blacks and lots of detail in the highlights that can be "burned in" when printing to show the detail, digital cameras pickup lots of details in the shadows, and bright lights and whites are basically void. You can bring out detail in the blacks on a digital image by using fill light in a photo manipulation program, but you can't "burn" white and get detail. So once the light fades enough, getting detail in the moon without a tripod and exposing for the brightness of the moon is almost impossible with a digital camera. The moon appears as a white disk on the image that could just as well be the sun.