I fell in love with the song “Blue Moon” by the Marcels when I first heard it in 1961; I excitedly played it for my mother who was clearly aghast when she heard the doo-wop sounds of “bomp-baba-bomp a ding a dong ding, blue moon” emanting from the radio. “They ruined that song!” she exclaimed. It was news to me that it was an “old folks” song and that my mother actually knew it! Until that moment, I hadn’t a clue that Rogers and Hart wrote it in 1934 when my mother was about the age I was when I discovered it. I never played it in Mom’s presence again, but I still love that song and whenever I hear a standard version, it seems somber and doesn’t have the pumping rhythm that the doo-wop group gave to it.
I’m posting two photos of today’s “blue moon.” It’s technically not a blue moon today, although my Google moon phase app says the moon is full now. The blue moon, a rare second full moon in a calendar month–hence the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’–actually occurs, according to everything I’ve read, at 6:59AM tomorrow morning so I’m a little early. Although I posted a moon shot a few days ago in honor of Neil Armstrong, I have to thank my photoblogger friend Melinda who asked me if I was going to photograph it despite having recently posted a moon shot. Since I hadn’t taken a single shot today until I took the moon shots, I have to thank her for giving me my “photo of the day!” I cropped and added a cyanotype preset to turn the moon blue. The second shot is cropped but is the color of the moon when I took it as it rose in the eastern sky.
And . . . several hours later, here’s how it looked; photo taken in DX mode and cropped; lots of camera movement on all three shots, despite the tripod and my holding the lens still, but not too successfully:
