The Heaven-Held Secret to Moments of Wonder: Mark Gee at TEDxChristchurch (Transcript)

Mark Gee – Award winning photographer

(Video)

So, yeah, I have to ask: “Have you ever stopped and actually watched the moonrise?” A few people. I am… I’ve watched many moonrises actually, and I am always amazed by the beauty of it.

Back in 2012, I was watching one such moonrise over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington. It revealed the silhouettes of all these people up there, and that moment was when the idea of “Full Moon Silhouettes” originated. It took me a year of chasing this moon around and failed attempts trying to get this moonrise, but finally, on this perfectly clear and amazing evening, back in January, end of January 2013, I managed to film this moonrise like no other. I uploaded this video to the Internet, and it just went viral.

I started getting thousands of e-mails from people all over the world. This included e-mails from mainstream media wanting to have interviews with me. I had all these skeptics saying: “Well, you know, you faked it, it’s all false, it’s not real.” And then I had astronomers and academics, and scientists, and they are all doing the math, and to their surprise, their calculations matched the moonrise almost perfectly.

But the thing is that the most amazing e-mails I actually got, the most amazing and memorable e-mails I got, were just from ordinary people. People from all over the world who just wrote to me to thank me, and wanted to share their experiences of watching “Full Moon Silhouettes”. Some of these experiences were incredible, and are very personal experiences. I remember a few in particular. There was one from a mother. She said her daughter had sent her the video to watch. They’d had a major, you know, break-up, – if you call that a break-up – they just hadn’t spoken to each other for like 5 years, and the mother watched the video. After she watched it, she called her daughter up and said, “Hey, don’t you want to come over, and we can talk about this?” So they watched the video again, and then they spent the rest of the day sort of reconciling their differences.