Super Moon

Super Moon over Springdale Farm in Northampton Park, Monroe County

Haze on the horizon made it difficult to get a good moon
moon picture while it was still low in the sky.

Shortly after publishing last week's post I decided to get a jump on coming up with a photo for this week and told Amy I was going to go over to  Northampton Park to try and get a super moon picture. The park is less than 5 miles from our house and I figured we might have a vantage point to get a reasonable shot.  The technique for shooting an interesting full moon picture (super moon or not) is to catch the moon early after it rises while its still close to the horizon.  You then want to use as long a lens as you can to compress the scene, bringing farther objects (moon) closer to the foreground objects (Springdale Farm in my case).

My lovely assistant working hard. (iPhone 5)

The location we chose to setup proved to be too close to the farm for me to achieve the affect I wanted so I ended up using photoshop and created the above image from two separate exposures.  If I were able to back up another 1/4 mile or so I'm fairly certain I could have framed the shot as composed above.  The farm house base image was shot at 160 mm (240 mm equivalent on my D300) and the moon was shot at 340 mm (510 mm equivalent).  In addition the picture I chose to feature is an HDR composition of 5 exposures.  I've added the non-HDR version below along with the version without the bigger moon.

Original frame as shot.

You may be wondering why I photoshopped my picture to achieve the result shown above and may even accuse me of cheating to get the picture I wanted.  Some argue that a picture of a scene needs to look like it did in real life and if I were a photo journalist I would agree completely.   When shooting the moon with a long telephoto lens composed with foreground elements it never looks like it did in real life because the moon becomes so magnified that it looks surreal.  I did not have a scene that would permit me to create that affect so I chose to do so with some photoshop magic.  This may not have been what Ansel Adams meant when he said "You don't take a photograph, you make it.", but that is how I choose to interpret it.

If you would like to leave a comment on what you think about this, I'd be happy to read it.

Non HDR composition.  Sky darkened slightly from
original exposure.

The pictures in this week's post were taken with my Nikon D300 and an AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm lens and a 1.7x teleconverter for added reach unless otherwise noted.