As a hobby photographer, intellectual property attorney Greg Revera never thought his snapshot of a full moon would one day have the potential to be viewed by millions, affixed to the right-hand corner of mail sent across the country.

But a photo he took in 2010, which shows the glowing orb's surface and craters contrasted against the pitch black of space, will be featured on a U.S. Postal Service Forever Stamp to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which is July 20.

As a child with a passion for science, Revera never thought he'd end up a lawyer, either, even though both his grandfather and great-grandfather were successful attorneys, while his mother spent years as a court interpreter and human resources representative in the New Jersey court system.

“I've always been fascinated with science, from the time I was a little, little kid,” Rivera said, adding that he always assumed he would pursue a career in a STEM-related field. “I had a love for biology, astronomy and space.”

While studying marine biology and marine affairs as an undergraduate student at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of Miami, Revera said he eventually found a passion for policy work, which led him attend The George Washington University Law School, where he graduated in 1999.

After completing law school, Revera spent more than a decade at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Huntsville, Alabama, where he made partner. Throughout the years, he said he struck up a friendly relationship with a litigation adversary, Mo Brooks, who in 2010 was elected to serve as a U.S. representative. Soon after the election, Brooks asked Revera to come by his office to discuss his future.

Moon photo, right, by Greg Revera, Stamp image courtesy of U.S. Postal Service

“When your congressman wants you to sit down with him, you sit down with him,” Revera said. After being offered an of counsel position at Brook's small firm, which was renamed Leo Law Firm after his departure to Washington, the deal was too good to turn down.

“I was not anticipating switching firms, but it was a good fit for me at the time,” Revera said.

Revera spent nearly six years at the firm, whose main client was American Builders & Contractors Supply Co. Inc. But he said the work involved extensive travel, and while he enjoyed his time at the firm, he wanted the opportunity to spend more time with his wife and four children.

“It was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of travel, and travel is very tiring,” he said. “I decided to hang the shingle.”

Since he left Leo Law Firm in 2016, Revera has been a solo intellectual property practitioner. He's a registered patent attorney, but he said he doesn't do a lot of patent prosecutions, and a lot of his work deals with trademarks.

Passion for Photography

Throughout his move from Big Law to a small firm to a solo practitioner, Revera maintained his love for science and space and combined it with another of his hobbies: photography. His father and his grandfather, both engineers by trade, were amateur photographers, and at a young age Revera also found a love for making photos.

“As a child, I was in the darkroom,” he said, explaining that in his childhood home his father build a full-service darkroom where he learned to develop and print photos. Today, all of the original equipment resides in his basement. But he said the genesis of the Internet and digital cameras—which Revera said can create better photos of space and the moon than NASA film equipment from the 1970s—created a new space for amateur photographers who wanted to capture their own images of space.

In 2010, he said he was mostly still shooting with film. “I was still fighting the move to digital,” he said, but his wife had a new digital camera, and after seeing other citizen photography of space he decided to purchase an attachment that connected the camera to his telescope. With the setup, he began to photograph Mars, deep space and a few photos of the moon in various stages.

Eventually, he said he wanted to try to capture a full moon—a tricky endeavor, since depending on where you are geographically, full moons are only visible for a few hours on a specific night.

During the attempt, Revera said he was “fighting the equipment and fighting the weather.” But he managed to snap a few decent images. In post-production, he said the power of digital photos became clear: He was able to use “focus stacking,” a processing technique in which he took his best shots from the evening and blended them into one superior image that was sharp and detailed.

From there, Revera entered the photo into an online Wikipedia competition, which he didn't win. But a few months later, the editor in charge of the website's informational page about the moon used his image.

“As these things tend to go, it was out there and people started contacted me to use it as a reference image,” he said. Multiple newspapers have reprinted the image to accompany articles about space, and he said NASA has also used his image.

Two years ago, an employee at the U.S. Postal Service contacted him to ask about potentially using the image for a postage stamp or another product—the agency was very nonspecific, Revera said. He was bound to confidentiality until earlier this year, and he found out in March that his photo would would be one of two commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing's 50th anniversary.

“I literally learned two days before the press release,” he said.

In all, Revera said the experience is made all the more special because he lives and practices in Madison, Alabama, which is a short drive from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

“I have so much love for the space program,” he said. “The Apollo mission, and stamps in general, are both part of our national heritage.”

“To have me contribute just a little bit to that is very humbling and really makes you smile,” he said.