Raul Roa has been a general-assignment photographer in Los Angeles for 20 years. He covers everything. The overturned tractor-trailer on I-5. The water polo meet at Glendale High. The protests in downtown Los Angeles after Ferguson. He does it all.
But the geography of his beat — north of Los Angeles — and where it is in relation to his home in Whittier, south of there, has unexpectedly birthed a hobby. Every day as he drives home, he sees planes swooping down to land at Los Angeles International Airport.
He lives right under the airport’s flight path.
It would not be a stretch to say that some people might find this irksome — the noise alone — but Mr. Roa, 49, has an eye, of course, and his eye, one commute home 18 months ago, turned to a ripe full moon perched in the sky, plump as could be. He noticed how perfectly silhouetted the planes were as they flew past the moon. He was driving along the Pomona Freeway. He took the next exit, which led him to the parking lot of the Montebello mall.
“I waited for another plane to go by,” Mr. Roa said. “It was nighttime. Clear. Two or three planes went by and I snapped a couple of shots. And there it was. I had it.” It was a stunning photo, the sharp outline of a plane framed within the perfect white orb of the moon.
And so he came to a very specific practice of photography. First, he started paying attention to the moon’s phases. When it was full, or close to it, he headed to Palm Park near his house, or the parking lot of Ralph’s supermarket or even behind a Denny’s. Then he would set up his tripod and shoot the moon. He posted his photos on Instagram, and this led to a lot of compliments from fellow photographers.
So he invited them out to shoot the moon with him.
Some of them were press photographers in the area, including Nick Ut. Mr. Ut is best known for his Vietnam War photos, especially the image of the young girl running away from a bombed village, her clothes burned off her body by napalm. Mr. Ut and Mr. Roa have been colleagues for years.
They might give each other a nod at a news conference, but it’s hard to really socialize when they are working. They have to concentrate on getting the picture. So when a bunch of photographers are invited to get together informally, friendships are cemented.
Now several of them get together monthly, chasing that perfect photograph. They call themselves the Lunartics. Sometimes they barbecue — carne asada and lamb — and sometimes they talk shop. And always they shoot the moon.
“It’s something different,” said Mr. Ut, 64. “I came here after the Vietnam War and covered almost everything. I live in the hills in L.A. Every time a plane flies over my house, you see them dancing in the moon. All my friends call me and say, ‘Nicky, we going to go out at the end of the month.’ ”
Getting a good shot is really hard, as there are several factors at play, like the plane’s altitude and the degree at which the moon sits in the sky. Planes could be flying over, but depending on the timing, they could be just above or below the moon. Also, the plane’s size matters, as well as where the photographer is in relation to it all. So if it’s a big fat Airbus A380, the plane might block the moon. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Learjets, which can look tiny and get lost in the photo.
“Sometimes we get skunked,” Mr. Roa said, explaining how the photographers might be out for two or three hours and not get a decent shot. But when they do, there is a “collective primordial screaming and hollering that we all give out,” he said.
The Lunartics have been meeting monthly since their inception. The only time they missed a session was when it was overcast last November. It helps that Southern California and its predictably nice weather provide ideal conditions for a club that needs clear skies.
Mr. Roa has new goals. He wants to capture two planes crossing the moon at once, one closer and one far away, giving the illusion they are in the same space. “I look at the moon sometimes and wonder if I can capture other things, like birds or satellites or the International Space Station,” he said. “That would be nice, too.”
Raul Roa is a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times Media Group.
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