My friend Petey often says, and I’ve adopted this as my personal motto, “Some days it’s better to be lucky than good.” Luck accounts for a great number of the finest photographs out there, since the one element completely out of the photographer’s control is the convergence of time and place to formulate the perfect moment. The photo above is one of those moments.

I’m sure many of you have noticed that magnificent full moon we have had the past few nights (Brucellosis, I’m talking about YOU). It’s a fun photographic subject, but without a telescope or a very expensive lens it’s hard to get any really impressive photographs of it. The true beauty of such a moon, however, lies in its relationship to objects below.

I was bummed about missing Sunday night’s sunset by only a short moment. As I came up south Washington Street, I noticed the moon rising in the east, and it looked quite cool. I bolted up to a hill in northwest Bismarck, and caught that nice moon in a nice relationship to the state capitol building!

It ain’t easy getting a shot like this. Monday night I tried to better it, hoping to get a photo of the moon right beside the capitol, and was unable to do so. I realized that without roof access somewhere, it’s nearly impossible to get such a shot. The reason is that one has to be far enough away from the capitol to make it appear small in the shot, having a good relationship with the moon, but also be positioned in the correct angle. Frankly, there aren’t many positions in Bismarck that fit the bill. Either there’s a power line, tree or building in the way, or the angle is just plain wrong. As it turns out, Sunday night I was lucky. Good.