Day 79 - Spring and the Moon

The "perigee full moon" presented some awesome opportunities to get photos of earth's only natural satellite. I'm sure you'll find hundreds of pictures of this close-hanging, brightly lit moon all over the internet by now. So how do you make your photograph different?

My goal was to try to get a picture while the moon was involved in some other aspect of the "landscape" but I almost missed it. After much struggle, I did finally manage to get this shot, involving the moon with clouds and buildings.

The challenge was to find some way to deal with the amazing amount of light being reflected from the moon. If you want detail from the moon's surface, you have to reduce greatly the amount of light entering the camera. With so little light coming in, the remainder of the image (the clouds, trees, buildings) doesn't show up at all. If you want to include those other features, you risk over-exposing the moon and having it turn into a flat white fireball, dominating the photo.

To get this one, I put the Olympus down on the sidewalk in a fairly open space, aimed it by using the screen on the back and then took a series of shots to try to find the right light balance.

The small photo (of just the moon itself) was taken at an unbelievable setting of 1/200th of a second shutter speed with the aperture at its narrowest (f8). Amazing to be shooting with those settings at night.

I cropped the second image in iPhoto to eliminate the flat black sky that surrounded the moon and make the planetoid fill the frame. With an exposure that low, of course, there was no chance of anything but the moon showing up in the image. And you can see very clearly the details of the moon's surface.