Super Moon....Super Cropped

  

Like everyone else with a camera, it seems, I went out last Saturday evening to photograph the "super moon" or perigee moon--reportedly the largest moon we'll see for 20 years or so. Photographing the moon itself (without anything else in the frame) seems kind of redundant after a while, because all moon shots pretty much look the same. But it can be a nice element if used creatively in a landscape (or even as an element in a Photoshop montage) if you have an interesting foreground. I was shooting at the beach, at the mouth of the Housatonic River, and while I had water to use as a foreground (to get that nice silver or gold river of light), the problem that night was that because it was fairly dark when the moon rose, there was almost no way to balance the darker foreground with such a bright moon. 

Did you know that a good exposure for the full moon itself is the same as for a sunny landscape? In other words, you can get a good exposure of the moon (and just the moon) at say, 1/125 at f/16, at ISO 200, which is approximately the correct exposure for a landscape on a sunny day? But think about it, what is the moon but a lunar landscape--illuminated by the sun! 

There are other things you can do with a shot of just the moon though. For instance, you can enlarge it quite a bit and then merge it into another nighttime landscape--kind of cool because you can then have a huge moon over a city, for example. When I have a few minutes I'll combine the shot above into a skyline of Manhattan so you can see how that looks. In order to see how big a moon I could get out of one of my rather distant moon shots from Saturday night (see the shot below--I shot it with a 300mm lens, equivalent to a 450mm in 35mm and still not that big when it comes to moon photography), I decided to just keep enlarging it in Photoshop and sharpening it after each enlargement. The cropped image (at 300dpi) was about two inches square. So I went up in steps: to three inches square, then four inches square, etc. The final size of this file (again, at 300dpi) is about six-inches square. 

If you use the "bicubic smoother" option at the bottom of the resizing window in Photoshop, you can actually get surprisingly bigger images and better image quality by stepping it up this way than you might think--of anything. Use it when you want to make prints bigger than their native size or want to just use a part of the image for an enlargement.

Anyway, I was just playing with this shot, I did it in under five minutes. I cropped it, then blew it up (changed the dimensions) and repeated that three or four times and the moon you see above it the result. Again, I wasn't being careful as I would for a finished image, but just playing. Below is the uncropped photo. Considering how quickly I put this together in Photoshop, the enlarged shot is kind of cool looking.  Try this sometime if you shot the moon the other night (or have any shots of the moon) and see how big you can go. 

By the way, you can now subscribe to my blog postings via email--you'll get each new post in your email. And please help support the blog, start your Amazon shopping by clicking on an ad! Here's the uncropped shot:

Moonrise at Twilight at the Beach in the Snow: You Must Believe in Spring

The afternoon that I discovered Talia (see previous post), it was the first warm afternoon we'd had in what seemed like a century (and probably was a few months in reality) in Connecticut. It's been a tough winter. One of the things about staying indoors a lot though is that you forget how interesting (and dare I say it, pretty?) the winter world can be (especially when you're a writer that works at home). I really envy people that ski a lot (especially cross-country skiers--and I used to love cross-country skiing, so maybe next winter I'll go back to it) because they do get to see a lot of the nice side of winter. They probably hate it less.

Anyway, after I'd discovered Talia and spent an hour or so shooting photos of her (including a kind of nice series of depth of field studies that I may use in a book--provided I can get her to sign a release), I started to pack up and as always happens to me, I turned around to see a really fascinating view. It seems that whenever I'm about to leave and I'm just looking forward to putting the gear away and taking a ride, a shot pops up. Who am I to turn away? This is not a great shot in terms of composition (and I was standing on an ice field when I shot it and just hoping to keep my balance) but it had a lot of interesting exposure challenges: it was twilight, there was a full moon rising, the foreground was mostly snow and, oddly enough, there was a sunset going on behind me. Since I've been working on a book about exposure (an update of my book Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent), I decided to accept the challenge. Even though I'm not crazy about the shot, I think the mix of exposure challenges was fun to play with and it looks very much as I saw it: snow and sky bathed in twilight and the warm moon rising. (The shot was made at ISO 1600, by the way, so you will see some noise in the sky--but I thought it was minimal considering the low light.)

And, interestingly, I think this shot will remind me of the day the ice broke: the day that I could finally see spring in the light of the first full moon I'd noticed all winter. I think I heard spring talking to my soul in the moonlight, saying "Remember me?" And trust me, after this winter, my soul needs spring. Yours does too, probably. So, get out, find a pretty end-of-winter scene and let winter go. Wave it goodbye and wish it well. It's less than 30 days to spring: my neighbor told me the daffodils are coming up under the snow. I haven't seen them, but I believe her.

(The photo was made with a Nikon D90 body with an 18-70mm lens and exposed 1/50 at f/4.2, ISO 1600 and exposed in RAW.)

Go Catch Yourself a Full Moon!

Seeing the full moon rise above the treetops as I worked in my garden yesterday evening reminded me of this shot I took last summer at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, so I went and dug it out to share. Photographing the full moon is actually pretty easy: just use the longest lens you have (I used a 70-300mm Nikkor which is the equivalent of a 450mm when it's fully zoomed on my Nikon D90 body) and put your camera on a sturdy tripod. You must use some kind of a land reference (here just a snippet of dunes at the far side of a small bay) in order to provide some sense of scale for the moon--otherwise it's just lost in the sky and you can't tell how big it looks. As far as exposure goes, I trusted my D90's matrix metering for this shot, but I did shoot in RAW so that I could adjust the exposure and white balance after the fact. I did tweak both, but only a small amount (I made the sky a bit bluer and I brightened the shot about one stop). The great thing about shooting a full moon is that you get a few days where it's pretty full each month--and you get a new chance each month!

Shoot the Moon

Photographing the moon always seems somewhat exotic to me because not only are you making a night (or at least a twilight) photograph, but you're also photographing a landscape that only a dozen or so people have actually walked on. Taking pictures of the moon is also fun because you get another chance--weather permitting--almost every night. Although I prefer to shoot the moon when it's full, it's also great to capture one of those thin silver crescents in the twilight sky.

Photographing the moon is very simple and you can even do it in your "automatic" exposure mode. Interestingly enough, the correct exposure for a bright full moon (excluding whatever landscape you have in the foreground) is the same as for a sunny day: about 1/250 at f/16 at ISO 200. And why not, after all, it's being illuminated by the sun! You may have to adjust your exposure a bit if you want some foreground detail, but as a starting point, I would just put the camera in auto (or try night mode) and check your first shots on the LCD. If it looks too dark, add some exposure using the exposure compensation dial.

There is one trick to shooting the moon though and that's being sure to include a good ground reference. When you look at a huge full moon (especially when it's first rising in the twilight sky) it looks huge and the reason is because you have the horizon or some other ground reference. As the moon rises in the sky it becomes smaller and smaller. That's why it's also good to consult a tide/moon chart and see when there is going to be a good full moon and get to your location before it starts to rise. That way you can get a number of exposures before the moon gets too high in the sky and the size diminishes.

Sometimes a great moon will surprise you, too. I shot the full moon and power lines here in Port Aransas, Texas after photographing a sunset (and the afterglow) intently for about an hour. I turned around to pack up my gear and saw this huge full moon, so I slapped my 300mm lens back on the Nikon D70s body and started shooting. Remember, the sun sets in the west and the moon rises in the east, so next time you're photographing a sunset, turn around and look for the rising moon! And check out my site for more tutorials on night photography.