The Moon and the Stars

Success and failure. The pieces began to work together just as I had envisioned for this image. I had the exposure timed out perfectly for the length of star trails I wanted as well as to coincide with the moon-rise to illuminate the temple of the moon while being framed by the silhouette of these other formations. Then everything else happened. Fogged film, focus drift, too much cloud cover, some unintended light painting, etc. This is actually a second attempt with just a half-hour exposure after I guessed that the initial exposure had gotten ruined. This one was still close but not close enough. I have a whole collection of images that were ruined just enough that I won't use them yet close enough to let me know how good they might have been. Enough went wrong here that this image will not be printed but I thought it would be ok to show the almost successful failures occasionally as well. I may try to recreate this image again in the future. We'll see.