Full Moon Tips

Lunar Eclipse on 10/08/14. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2014

I think I have mentioned it before here and there, but I’ll summarize in this post…

Probably the best time to “shoot” SUNRISE landscapes with the full moon is actually a day or two after the official full moon.

Probably the best time to “shoot” SUNSET landscapes with the full moon is actually a day or two before the official full moon.

Why?

Well, here is the answer plus a few other key points…

1. First, in your images, the moon will still appear full even if it might really be at 97-98%. So, I personally don’t think it is necessary to be out for the real, honest-to-god, 100% full disc.
2. A day or two after the official full moon, the sun will rise while the moon is still above the horizon. This means the landscape foreground and mid-ground will have some nice side-lighting (and color!) on it while the moon’s disc will not appear so bright as to be blown out in your digital file. In other words, the dynamic range of the scene will be manageable, whereas on the day of the full moon, very often, the sky will still be fairly dark and the moon very bright before it sets. 
3. If you are not an early morning person and prefer shooting the moon at around sunset, then look at the charts to see when the moon will rise while there is still enough light on the landscape and in the sky to keep the dynamic range within acceptable limits. For example…Yesterday (Nov 14), when the moon was at 100%, we had our local sunset at 16:45p.m. but the moon didn’t rise until 17:25p.m., by which time the landscape was quite dark–tough for your camera’s sensor, unless you do some HDR shenanigans. On the other hand, the day before that (Nov 13), the moon was not quite full at 99.4%, but you had the moon rising at 16:39p.m. and the sun setting just a few minutes later, at 16:45p.m.–in this case, the dynamic range of the scene would likely have been easily handled with your camera’s sensor.
4. All of the above, of course, is aimed at folks wanting to capture a larger landscape, with potentially very beautiful light, that includes the moon but can’t seem to get both Luna and Earth exposed properly in one frame (the classic “moon-as-white-blob” syndrome). You may have other artistic goals, of course, in which case just ignore all this!
5. Check The Photographer’s Ephemeris for specific times and location details of sunrise/moonset at your chosen location.
6. Clouds in the sky, as long as the moon has room to peek out between the layers, often makes things that much more awesome.

Here is a series of images from this morning, two days after the full moon. Sunrise was scheduled by the universe for 6:46a.m. and the moonset at 7:47a.m. The moon’s disc was at 98.4%:

Contemplating the Sunrise. Above Cherryvale Road, Boulder, Colorado, 2016

Here comes the sun…Note the lack of snow, for mid-November, on Longs Peak:

First Light on Longs Peak. Above Cherryvale Road, Boulder, Colorado, 2016

And Sister Moon? Here she is! With both sun and moon up, it was easy to capture detail on the moon’s face (it isn’t just a white blob) as well as expose properly for the larger landscape (check your histogram!). Unfortunately, the wonderful clouds that would have made this image much more interesting had evaporated. But, there was also another issue–the moon wasn’t where I wanted it to be. In this photo, I have actually moved it from its original position to balance out the shot. See the next picture to see what I mean: 

Moon Over Boulder, #2. Above Cherryvale Road, Boulder, Colorado, 2016

This was the image before I tampered with it in Photoshop. Ideally, I would have planned things out a bit better and found a good vantage point some two to three miles to my right. That would have lined the moon up for an improved composition, putting it over that low area between the jagged edge of the First Flatiron and snowy Mt. Audubon. Lesson learned–pay attention to those lines on The Photographer’s Ephemeris that show you where the moon will set!

Moon Over Boulder, #1. Above Cherryvale Road, Boulder, Colorado, 2016

In the end, it was the very first photograph that I posted above that I liked the best–and the moon wasn’t even remotely involved. Sometimes you go out with the idea of making a certain, very specific, photograph but you come back with something completely different. So it goes…