I was looking out at the moon from my spot on the living room couch on Wednesday, and the thin haze of very light cloud cover was giving it a warm yellow color with a very slight surrounding haze.  From my vantage point, there were a few bare tree branches with large buds on them, ready to erupt into leaves.  The silhouette of the branches right next to the moon just looked really beautiful to me.  I thought for a moment that I should take a picture, but  knew that the phone in my pocket had no chance of capturing it.

So I sat there for a moment and then jumped up off the couch and scampered upstairs to get my good camera.  I knew the good camera had the ability to get the image, but I was also wary, because I still have trouble remembering how to get the camera to do what I want.  The user interface just simply has not been retained by my brain.  I wanted to lock focus on infinity, set up a fairly tight aperture, and have the fastest shutter speed possible.  I also knew I wanted the lowest ISO for the clearest image.  I took a few shots and fumbled with the controls, which I couldn't see without my reading glasses on.  At first the camera was giving me a perfectly white image of the moon, when the moon was clearly yellow.  And then I realized the camera was set to an auto white balance mode, so I found that sub menu and set it for "daylight" white balance.  Then I figured out how to lock the focus.   Getting the aperture how I wanted it and the shutter speed how I wanted it wasn't clear to me, and the camera seemed to be doing an ok job on its own, so I left those alone.

I took a few shots and was satisfied with them, so I went back from the window to the couch and looked at the shots.  They were ok, but still didn't show what my eyes could see, and when I looked through all of them, back to the first blurry perfectly white shot of the moon I had grabbed, I clicked to one photo further in the past and saw that the last picture I took with this camera was of a lunar eclipse.  It was a picture of the moon with a bite taken out of it.  I have no idea when the last lunar eclipse was. But it shows how infrequently I use this camera.  I guess this is my "moon camera" now and my phone has become my regular camera.

That first paragraph is poetry glatt.