Art - Shooting the Moon
Shooting the moon is DIFFICULT…at least for me anyway. The very first requirement for making a moon shot is to throw the idea of perfection out the window! So why do it? The moon resonates with people. It connects us to the stars, to the universe. Capturing it in a picture helps to refresh the positive experience from seeing it in the sky. Also, there is this. Some people don’t think you are a real photographer, unless you can produce a great moon shot (not a good reason, but this is a fact). It’s easy when the moon is out and about, to pull out the camera phone and shoot. Often the result is a disaster: a wildly bright object in the sky or a small white pill on a black background. Occasionally, when the moon is in the sky I will get a call, “Gray, the moon is fantastic right now. You should go take a picture of it!” And I say, “No!” Why? Because, any moon shot takes a lot of planning! For example, where is the moon going to be? Will there be the right amount of light when I see it? Where do I need to be located in order to get an interesting picture? What time do I need to take the shot since the band of time where there is enough light to include landscape elements is very short? So right out of the gate, taking a moon shot is not easy! And it get’s worse.
The challenges with shooting the moon are…
Where is the moon going to rise or set and at what time?
Where do I need to be to take the shot (and this includes how far away does the landscape element need to be from the camera)?
Will there be enough light or too much light when the moon shows up?
Provided you have light you can work with, what exposure do you need, since you are working with a very bright moon and a very dark background (a high dynamic range image)?
Note: forget about your camera’s exposure meter and good luck using Auto-Focus. I use manual focus for this!
After you capture the image with as little blur and with as little out-of-focus as possible, how do you process the image?
We are going to answer all four of these questions!
Location, location, location… For me, the ideal location to take a moon shot is high up on some sort of hill or mountain or on some plain looking at mountain peaks. For the picture I took in this blog, it is clear I choose the town below as a major subject and the town was over a mile away. The hills comprising the ragged horizon line were many miles away. Why is this important? It allows me to exploit the benefits of something called hyperfocal distance.
In the simplest of terms, as your subject gets farther and farther away, the depth of field at any aperture opening, gets bigger and bigger. The great thing about this, and how I exploited it for my moon picture in this blog, was I could use my biggest aperture opening! The more light that can get through the lens the better. You have more latitude to make adjustments to shutter speed and ISO levels with lots of light.
For the curious, I took this shot on the overlook trail at Adero Canyon in Scottsdale, Arizona. Yes I was high up looking out over the town of Fountain Hills. I had a 360 degree view. This will be a place I return to for future moon shots and other low light, sun rise and sun setting, and blue light, pictures.
Next issue: where and when is the moon going to rise or set? This chart shows the moon rise and set in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Looking at this chart, I took my moon shot on August 29th. I thought I would have a better result on the 30th and be able to catch the moon as it started to clear the horizon line. However, it was questionable if I was going to have sufficient light, since the moon rise would be 30 minutes later. But, on the 30th, the dense low clouds on the horizon blocked any view of a moon rise. So the effort was a bust! This is typical for moon shots.
If I was going to be persistent about this I would want more precise moon rise predictions. This moon app fits the bill!
Back to my shot! On the 29th, I set my Sony A7R V camera up on my Peak Design travel tripod using my GMaster 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.* My plan was not to shoot the moon (I wasn’t even thinking about it) but to shoot this image below…
Near the end of my shoot, I turned around and saw the moon staring right at me. That is why I didn’t get the moon rise over the horizon, I was too late to recognize what was happening behind me. What is the lesson? Always be looking. Don’t let your plan give you tunnel vision. Anyways, I was lucky, because I still had time! I realized I had to change my location and hike up a narrow steep trail, and I found a place I could reset the tripod. The image below shows my camera settings (the meta data) I used to take the original, unedited shot.
* Oh, I should add when you shoot the moon, bring the longest focal point lens you can.
Along with a stable tripod, it is important (at least to me) to have a fast shutter speed! If things aren’t absolutely stable, and you aren’t using a remote shutter release (as an example) a fast shutter speed helps prevent ruined blurry shots. The shutter speed I used was 1/1000 of a second, which some might say is overkill. And with underexposure comes noise (we address this later with the ISO discussion and using Lighroom’s AI). Noise can be reduced in post processing, but blur really can’t be fixed, thus my reasoning on a fast shutter speed. Plus, the moon is so bright, I am forced to underexpose by almost 4 stops (according to my camera meter) in order to capture the details of the moon (which you really can’t do, get the moon details, with a camera phone).
The next step is getting the image in focus. With my very modern zoom lens, I found that focusing to infinity, created a very blurry shot…everything was out of focus. It may be, and I am not sure, that all modern autofocus lenses go blurry this way, in order for the autofocus to work under any condition? To do manual focus I set the lens switch to manual focus, then used the focus ring to carefully adjust. Now, you see the reason why I did this using a tripod! If you have never used manual focus on a modern lens before, you might be surprised at how well it works! How a modern lens tries to help tell you, you are in focus in manual mode, can be astonishing. I won’t reveal anymore, other than you should try it.
At this point you might ask, “is there a YouTube video on how to shoot the moon that is on the horizon?” Some of my favorite photographic experts (who I won’t name) say it is impossible to shoot the moon with the landscape elements in focus in one shot? Well I achieved this! The link below goes to a YouTube by Joshua Cripps. For me, it is by far the best video I have found on how to shoot the moon.
Joshua Cripps on How to Shoot The Moon
Before we move on to processing this image, lets have a short discussion about the somewhat controversial topic of ISO.
Is it ISO or is it low light that creates noise in an image; noise that needs to be removed or reduced in post production? When you are shooting in low light, even if you are shooting at a low ISO, you will have more noise. That is why it is best to have an f/2.8 zoom over a f/4.5 or higher zoom lens! More light, less noise! More light, less ISO, less noise. But what is the real source of noise?
Here is how Tony Northrup thinks about light and noise and ISO. I agree with him by the way.
As in most things, there are also controversies in the photographic world! One of them lately has to do with ISO. Here is someone making a case that Tony Northrup doesn’t have it completely dialed in with his concept of ISO. If you are a nurd like me, you will love what Dave McKeegan describes about the inner workings of a digital camera and ISO.
Tony is Wrong About ISO, According to Dave McKeegan
And to be fair, here is Tony’s response!
Tony’s Response to “Tony was Wrong” Video
If you want to find out how noise is a function of ISO for your specific camera (so you know what some of your better options might be when setting ISO manually) here you go!
Photons to Photos Read Noise versus ISO
The reason for this discussion is because the first thing I do is use the AI Noise reduction tool in Lightroom. If you are a Topaz user I would recommend using noise reduction first, before all other adjustments, color profiles, and applying presets.
Here is my final word on ISO. In a modern digital camera the ISO can be though of as roughly how much all of the megapixel signals from the sensor are amplified. In conditions of low light, where you can no longer make changes to shutter speed and aperture, you would increase the ISO making the image you want to be brighter in the camera viewfinder. The higher ISO means there will be more amplification of the pixel signals leaving the sensor. The pixels that didn’t capture a photon, will show up as spots, and these spots define the noise in an image. Hence, the reason for ISO amplification is lack of photons! Not the level of ISO. This is why Tony likes to think of ISO as a speedometer, and if the speedometer is too fast, you need to figure out a way to get more photons to the camera sensor. By the way, it is up to you to figure out, what is too fast for your specific camera and leans combination.
Let’s process this image above using Lightroom! I decided to crop the image to remove most of, but not all of, the very front foreground of bushes and branches (which were out of focus, because of their closeness to the camera). After that, I focused my adjustments on the moon. In order to do that, I selected the sky mask, inverted this mask, since the moon was not selected, and then subtracted out all other mask elements.* The image below shows the resulting mask.
*If you spend a little time mastering Lightroom’s AI masking tools, there is a better way to do this. I leave that for you to find.
I worked with a magnified version of the moon to make adjustments to light, exposure, contrast, white balance, and dehaze, and a few other things. This image shows colored orange and aqua fringing around the moon.
If you wanted to know what the chromatic aberration tool is all about, well it removed most of the color fringing with just one click! Problem solved?
I was not done! I returned to the sliders for Light, and made slight changes to exposure, highlights, and black levels. The remaining chromatic aberration or fringing disappeared, while maintaining the surprisingly sharp moon detail.
The result above and below is a very pin sharp, white colored moon! It is also here, where even with some of my professional photography friends, the disbelief starts, “This isn’t possible. You cut and pasted the moon into position using Photoshop.” This was another motivating reason why I made this blog post.
With the moon tack sharp, it’s time to focus in on the landscape. Everything, but the moon was masked off. Changes were made to highlights, shadows, black levels, contrast, color, dehaze, texture, clarity, and sharpness. The next image shows the result at this stage.
With a color profile change, along with applying a couple of presets, the final adjusted image result is shown below.
In order to provide more focus and more drama to the image, a final narrow crop was applied.
My final word on this example, has to do with the amount of post production, where I used Lightroom. Clearly I used the mask tools in Lightroom, which you may not know, use AI! Even for me, where I have used masks over the span of a couple of decades, I use to get very nervous using them and get frustrated too, like the difficulty of masking out the sky with a brush! After spending just a little bit of time, I have been able to do many things at will, making localized Lightroom adjustments, like I did here with the moon and landscape. I encourage you to explore using masks in Lightroom! This short video shows just how quickly you can make extremely impactful adjustments for your pictures and how easy it is to do!
