Shooting the Moon

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my amateur photography adventure is shooting at night, while dealing with multiple light sources.

My wife and I live atop a mountain, which is really cool in and of itself, but last night we watched the full moon rise over the mountain, and I seriously almost tripped over my jaw, it was so amazing to watch.  I resolved myself to catching it tonight, but I had a lot of trouble with it.

Click on any of the images below to view larger

Here’s the hillside across from my house:

As you can see, There’s light on the hillside, there’s light coming up from behind the hill, and there’s light being cast onto the hillside from my side of the street.

Tricky.

So, I spent a little bit of time finding the right exposure time for the hillside, and I think this one is it.  You can see the moon approaching from behind.

And now the moon rears her pretty head

I managed to get one more good shot taken before it all went bad:

As you’ll see from the next shot, when the moon became visible, it was by many orders of magnitude,  the brightest thing in the shot.  I then had to jump back and forth between trying to expose the shot for the moon (in an attempt to show some of the details of the craters) or to expose for the mountains (to maintain the balance of the objects in the shot.)

There was no way to do this without pulling out a massive spotlight to illuminate the hillside.

Here’s what I did get:

Hillside is starting to disappear:

In the shot above, you can make out a cloud, and the lens flare is nice.

Here’s what the moon actually looked like:

This was a fun experiment.  I had no idea what was going to come out of it.  I enjoy night shooting a lot, because of the challenge it presents.

Thanks for reading.

For your enjoyment, I’ve included some other night shots that I’ve done below.

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Have a great night, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

~ Chris

 

Tagged as: Digital Photography, iLife, Nikon D90, Your Digital-Life