Waxing gibbous moon (27 January 2018)

On Saturday (27 JAN) shortly after sunset I went outside and noticed a gorgeous waxing gibbous moon.  To say that a moon is waxing means that the illuminated portion of the moon is growing - the moon is getting closer to being full.  The opposite of waxing is waning.  A waning moon is a moon that is past full and its illuminated percentage is decreasing.  Gibbous means that a moon is more than 50% full - the moon last night was at 83%.

I took about 30 images of the moon in all.  Here is one of the original images.

For the photo geeks out there - this image was shot on a Canon 60D with a Canon 100-400 lens (at 400mm), shot at f/11, using an ISO of 100 and exposed for 1/100 second.


I decided to crop this image in a couple of different ways.  First as a horizontal image...

Then as a vertical image...

I'm not sure which of these crops I like better.  In both I intentionally placed the moon slightly off-center.  I like the expanse of black extending further from the lit face of the moon.  This is the same technique used in portraits to give the subject somewhere to look or in photos of animals to give them space within the frame of the photo to look or move.