There’s something about the moon that has always drawn us to gaze up at it. For centuries, poets and artists have extolled the moon, praised it, sang to it, and loved it. Popular opinion holds that the moon has power over us, that the full moon riles our emotions and the new moon makes us fearful in the dark. Whatever the reason, what I am certain of is that the moon has an equal – if not stronger – effect on photographers.

Few among us haven’t, at one time or another, pointed a lens skyward and shot a few frames. Most of us have done it many times. On a basic level, the moon adds an element to landscapes; it fills in a portion of the sky, taking away dead space. And of course the romantic notions associated with it translate into the photo as well. All this is completely understandable.

But yet we keep returning to it. We keep looking up with our longest lenses at night, zoomed in as far as possible. At 300mm, the moon takes up perhaps 10% of the frame (the rest, naturally, being utterly black). That’s beyond minimalism – there are few such subjects we’d bother with. Yet we persist in shooting frame after frame, cropping, doing any manner of trick to make the moon larger in our image.

Let’s face the facts: one moon shot looks essentially like another, shot through a telephoto lens against a black sky. Certainly the phases can lend variation to the overall scene, but in the end we all have, stored away on our hard drives, a dozen moon shots from different days, all looking pretty much the same. And yet we keep doing it.

I did it the other night. I was packing up to leave, actually had the camera back in the bag when I thought, “What the hell.” I took it back out, mounted the telephoto, and took another few moon shots.