Snow Moon - First Supermoon of 2020! February 9th 2020 - Yolo County, California

 Another outing with the Olympus camera Test and Wow program.  This time I wanted to see how it held up in low light by shooting the supermoon.  To be honest, the resulting photos were a bit noisy.  But let it also be known that I am hit or miss when it comes to night shots.  lol  But that won't stop me from trying!  

But usually I  do some research and refresh my memory on settings and tips.  But on this trip, I didn't really do that because I didn't even have a tripod available and just kind of decided to head out on the spur of the moment. 

I had one main target.  The Milk Farm sign off Interstate 80 in Dixon. 

This is an historic landmark of sorts which was almost demolished.  But it still stands to this day and most folks probably drive by without even much of a glance. 

The Milk Farm Restaurant - which the sign originally heralded - was built in 1928 and was featured in the famous Saturday Evening Post in 1940 which kind of put Dixon's dairy industry in the spotlight. 

I remember stopping there on church outings back in the 70's & 80's (even though now it seems like that is just a hop, skip, and jump away so it's weird that we always were ready for a rest stop at that point back then!)

And then it closed in 1986, the year my daughter was born, due to serious wind damage.  But residents of Dixon didn't want it destroyed, so the building was dismantled and placed in storage and the sign was left standing!

It has a cow jumping over the moon and I thought it might actually frame the supermoon and look cool!  But!  I needed a lot of things to happen right for the perfect execution.  And it didn't.  haha

But to start, I pulled over at the Yolo Basin Wildlife Area (where surprisingly the gate was open) to see if I could get a photo of the moon over Sacramento with some water.  

Again, no tripod so I shot all semi-longer exposure by putting the camera on the roof of the car.  :-)

I propped it at the right angle by using my fleece jacket.  :)  Luckily the moon was pretty low to the horizon in all of these shots. 

This first one was a closeup of just the moon with the 300mm lens.  It was super, super noisy!  I used DeNoise to try to tone it down with mixed results. 

A slightly less cropped version with less noise. 

I kind of like this one shot between two trees! Noisy, but looks cool. 

And now!!  The famous Milk Farm Sign!

And the story is that I sat here in my car - in some driveway to a farmhouse (which was pretty long so I didn't have anyone wondering about me - or so I thought).  I sat there for quite some time waiting for the moon to rise high enough to get over the sign and HOPEFULLY be in the right spot.  

It was a little bit cold and a little bit scary, but I was just off the freeway so I didn't think a serial killer would get me.  

But!  I think I was even more nervous when California Highway Patrol car pulled up and parked just off the road kitty corner to me.  After about 10 minutes, the car started up and pulled closer to me and the copy put his spotlight on my car.  He walked over and I, slightly embarrassed, explained what I was trying to do. 

He said he was on his lunch break and said he would hang around to make sure I was okay.  I, again slightly embarrassed, told him that I would just leave because I had taken some test shots of the sign illuminated by my car's headlights and it wasn't really bright enough to see the sign.  

He very sweetly offered to put his car spotlight on the sign so we gave it a try. 

It worked!  Kind of!  It was actually even better when the moon was above the sign (which took about 10 more embarrassing minutes) and the sign was not so backlit!  With both my headlights and the spot light this time, the moon DID align how I had hoped and I was able to get a shot that is halfway decent!!

The Moon Jumping Over The Cow Jumping Over The Moon over the Milk Farm!

I used post production in Photoshop to lighten the sign a bit more and bring back some detail in the moon, but having the CHP spotlight on the word "Milk" really helped me achieve my whimsical dream.  :-)  

The very nice CHP officer and I parted ways after I promised to drive safely back home.  He seemed quite amused that I had driven 20 minutes and sat in my car for about 20 minutes to get one crappy photo!  lol  

xoxo