Tonight the moon was very large and low in the sky.  I took it as a perfect opportunity to use my Christmas present.

Back in October, Matt and I went to the Blue Ridge Parkway to watch the sun rise over the colorful mountain tops. It was extremely cold and the wind was blowing just enough to make being outside of the car’s heat nearly unbearable. Since the skyline was so beautiful, though, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to get a few great shots of us together with the mountains and sky in the background. But there was a problem. We might have seen 10 cars on the Parkway the entire time we were there. So no one was around to take the picture for us.

Being the crafty person I am, I decided to set the camera on the back of my car and set the self timer. And it worked fabulously. We got several great shots of us with gorgeous mountains and sky behind us. But then mother nature blew my camera off the back of the car and made it slam onto the pavement. This did irreparable damage to my camera. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t take any more pictures for the duration of our trip–but we were only about halfway through our planned course.

Since I had been lusting after a dSLR, and Matt had just gotten a pretty nice bonus at work, he let me go ahead and get my Christmas present. A Nikon D40. I’ve pretty much been playing with it non-stop since I got it, which is partially the reason for my absence here. For Christmas I got a telephoto zoom lens and am now able to take far-away shots. Tonight’s moon was perfect. Even though it was too high in the sky to get any landscape with it, I was able to move my camera’s eye past the city light and up into the sky to record tonight’s night light.