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I'd just started a morning climb of my local hill, Moel Famau in North Wales, when I glanced up at the sky and saw this beautiful juxaposition of the waning crescent moon against high altitude cirrus clouds.
The sun hadn't yet popped over the horizon, but was close enough to light the cirrus while leaving the sky a lovely shade of cool blue.
An added bonus was that the view I was looking at was at roughly 90 degress to the yet to rise sun, so I used my polarising filter to great effect to darken the sky and make the cirrus cloud and moon really stand out, so much so that the effect became almost surreal, which I really liked.
So having spent a good few minutes rooted to the spot photographing clouds I re-packed my camera and carried on up to the top of Moel Famau. The sun came up and I took quite a few more photos on the climb up and down, but none had quite the impact of this pre-sunrise image.
You never know when and where your next bit of inspiration is going to come from, and I'm certainly glad I made the effort to carry my camera with me that morning.
Filename - moon crescent 06.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 105mm
Exposure - 1/6sec @ f11, ISO100
Location - Moel Famau, North Wales
This image - 640x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Polarising filter used to darken blue sky
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