Primary Sources

Florida’s Photographer Laureate

The St. Pete Times has a piece on Florida photographer John Moran, described as the state’s “photographer laureate“. The story has a description of his photo of the Hale-Bopp Comet in 1997:

He spent a year looking for the perfect oak to accompany his famous photograph of Comet Hale-Boppe in 1997 because he wanted the celestial event to be grounded in a Florida landscape. He built a special platform for his Nikon, a platform that would track the comet as the earth rotated. He used radio-triggered strobes to light up the wizened oak for 1/1000th of a second and kept the lens open another five minutes to capture the night sky.

“When I saw how the photo turned out, I cried,” he says.

This is why:

[Photo by John Moran]

Although I rather prefer Moran’s shots of some of Florida’s rivers and springs, overlooked beauties.