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Shawn Malone
Full moons make great models when it comes to taking landscape shots with an intriguing atmosphere. The problem is getting details of the moon while balancing the lighting in the rest of the photo. It can all be accomplished in one exposure by waiting for the correct light and using a telephoto lens. I’ll explain how I did it.
This spring I headed to Crisp Point Lighthouse in Michigan for a night of viewing fantastic northern lights against a flat, calm Lake Superior. The bright aurora shone through the full moon and wolves howled occasionally in the distance. (I wish I could photograph sound.)
Later, in the wee hours looking toward Little Lake Harbor, I wanted to get the full moon setting. A tripod and cable release were musts.
In my first attempt (the second photo in the gallery above), the moon appeared as a blown-out white dot. Details on the moon face weren’t visible and it was overexposed.
Now what? If I decreased the shutter speed or ISO to get the details in the moon, then the exposure of the overall composition would become too dark. Thanks to digital cameras, I could make a composite image by taking two exposures, one for the moon and one for the scene, and fusing them, but I’d rather get the scene in one exposure.
The moon was too bright to get a balanced exposure in one shot. The photographic solution? Patience. If I waited until the light balanced between the sky and moon, I could get my shot. The danger was that when the moon got lower on the horizon, it might be obscured by haze.
My other concern was that the moon was too small in the overall composition in my first photo, which was taken with a 35mm lens – the only one that I brought to shoot the aurora borealis. I needed my telephoto, the one all the way back in the car.
Laziness is a detriment to great photos, so I’m thankful in retrospect that despite being tired after a night on a chilly beach, I talked myself into making the hike there and back.
Too often it’s easy to say I’ll just work with what I have or I’ll come back another day. The reality is that you only get one shot at great photographic opportunities and lighting – they might never come around together again.
By the time I got back with my telephoto, the moon was minutes from sinking out of sight. It had gone from a bright white to a golden orange-yellow ball hovering on the horizon.
The moon’s brightness had dampened, blending with the sky. This was good, but I needed to act fast and already had scoped out the terrain for the best positioning.
To get far enough from the pilings to put them and the moon in focus, I moved back from where I took my first shot. I tried several points on the zoom lens, working to get the desired detail in the moon while pulling the horizon into the composition. The zoom lens allow a greater depth and showed horizon features lost with my first 35mm shot.
I tried 130mm, 200mm and 300mm settings. The higher setting got better moon detail, but sacrificed the landscape. I was fortunate on this beach, where the moon set in line with a Lake Superior shore stretched in a straight line for miles. Also on this day, due to the timing of the moonset and sunrise, I got nice warm light on the pilings and sandy beach from the sun rising behind me.
So now I had my composition with the sharp, clear focus on both the moon and the pilings.
Next, I used a mirror lock up to ensure the slap of the interior mirror wouldn’t shake the camera when I released the shutter via the cable.
Finally came decisions about camera settings; you can use the camera’s automatic light meter and histogram to guide you. I needed an aperture setting that would ensure sharpness throughout the image and a shutter speed slow enough to capture the low light, but fast enough to keep the moon from being blurred as it moved. I chose an aperture opening of F16 to get a wide enough area of focus, again keeping the pilings and moon sharp. I allowed a little blur in the foreground to draw the eye toward the moon.
I wanted as low an ISO as possible to keep image noise to a minimum. I settled on ISO 400, but you need to experiment. The new high-end SLR cameras have greatly improved image quality and reduced image noise even at very high ISOs.
One perk of digital is instant results; you can check what you get as you go. Keep shooting and adjusting.
My final settings: 130mm lens, ISO 400, f-stop of F16 and shutter speed of 1/13 sec. The end result is the photo at the top of this story.
It was an all-nighter, but I went home happy with northern lights and full moon shots on one of the most beautiful, remote Lake Superior shores.
Shawn Malone is a regular contributor to Lake Superior Magazine. Her Lake Superior Photo page on Facebook has nearly 100,000 fans.
This edition of "Nice Shots" was sponsored by Odyssey Resorts.