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Moon Rise Over the Truckee River

My kids and I are visiting Grandma in Truckee this morning, so here's a moon rise I captured here back in 2006.

Truckee, California December 2006

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33 thoughts on “Moon Rise Over the Truckee River”

  27. Mark Seibold
    Reply

    Howard has asked a good question. As an astronomer, artist and photographer for most of my life, placing in award winning, internationally published  photography and awarded art published in NASA sites, I can tell you that getting the moon exposed in a camera properly, with a dim landscape setting combined, whether digital and/or film, is very difficult. There is a very narrow window of twilight. Sometimes photographers are lucky on the timing. As the ground light fades after sunset or brightens increases fast just before sunrise, balancing the proper exposure with the moonlight (and the moonlight is virtually reflected sunlight or daylight as the moon as a celestial object is the second in brightness in the sky after the sun) and is a great test to photographers. If the dim ground light in a landscape is properly exposed, the moonlight can become overexposed and 'whites out', loosing all of the surface lunar details. Conversely, if the moon is properly exposed then the landscape ground can become underexposed and too dark, rendering the ground as nearly invisible. To overcome this, many Photographers will now use electronic or Photoshop processing of layering the separate parts of images to achieve striking, dramatic yet natural results. Many Photoshop tools may be used. To simply say that a photograph has been Photoshopped is a very general expression, not explaining much of the work involved. Our live human eye and/or artists renderings by hand can naturally compensate for this, where the camera as a computer controlled and automated machine cannot easily. This is where the manual mode comes into play for professional photographers. It takes an experienced photographer through much practice to achieve good results. Jeff captured this image quite well with practiced professional intuition in his camera settings. Congratulations Jeff!

  28. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    +Howard deGa the settings question always surprises me, because whatever the settings were at this moment, they were probably different for the nearly identical-looking shots just before and after.  Situations, lighting and exposure values change so much in the most compelling moments of landscape photography (sunrise, sunset, etc), it would not be very productive to try to have things memorized.  It's much better to know how to bracket exposures, to quickly zero in on the best settings on the fly.

    There are a few useful things to remember when pursuing landscape – moon images like this one though:

    1. Focus and depth of field – don't focus on infinity, the moon, the background mountains, or let your camera choose what to focus on.  You'll have the most depth of field at smaller apertures like f/16 and if you don't know the "hyperfocal distance" (place to focus for maximum depth of field at that focal length), a rule of thumb is to focus 1/3 into the scene (roughly between the rocks on the right bank of the river to the ones in the center downstream).

    2. Prevent the moon from blurring – The moon moves during your exposure.  To minimize motion blur as it moves, while you're considering how small you can make your aperture to get maximum depth of field (shoot in Aperture Priority mode), watch the shutter speed and do not let it go beyond 1/focal length.  If this was shot at 100mm for example, I'd want the shutter speed to go no further than 1/100th of a second.

    3. These sunset moon rise shots can be anticipated every month –  The app +The Photographer's Ephemeris lets you see the moon rise and sun set times, and the angle of the moon and sun at any time of day from your shooting position, all on a +Google Earth satellite map.  Here's a blog post describing that process:
    Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments
    http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/09/07/anticipating-sun-and-moon-alignments/
    The full moon generally comes up too late and too bright in the night sky for photography on the exact full moon date, so the day before the 100% full moon dates is usually when the moon comes up early enough to be in the sky at sunset.  You probably won't notice any difference from full if it's only 98% full.  The key though is that the brightness of the moon remains in balance with the surrounding landscape for some length of time before and during sunset, so you can line up the moon with terrestrial objects and no worry too much about camera settings or trying to do any special post-processing tricks to preserve the detail on face of the moon.

    So here's what I ended up with: 
    Date: 12/4/06 5:43 PM
    Camera: Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi
    Exposure: 0.3 sec (1/3)
    Aperture: f/22
    Focal Length: 96 mm
    ISO Speed: 100
    Exposure Bias: -2.33 EV

    That last setting was due to the fact that I almost always bracket exposure.  Remember that digital exposures are practically free on a per-shot basis.  An experienced amateur can nail the exposure in one shot, a pro won't care about who he impresses with dangerous technique, he'll bracket not only to nail the exposure (in more of the 1-5% of times when its almost physically impossible to get all shot parameters optimized), he'll also do it to have images with different amounts of noise to choose from as he chooses the one to print.  Underexposure can sometimes yield the best color and contrast, but noise can get high in the shadows, so it's good to have the darkest exposure for reference as you post-process, but also have a backup exposure or two to select from to optimize other digital image parameters.  This is one of the things which makes digital photography very different from film photography.  An expert in film photography will often have developed habits which are counterproductive in digital photography (yet the whole industry is still geared towards pretending that digital photography is just a digital version of film photography).  In digital photography things can vary even from camera to camera, so you have to take everything you read with a grain of salt, and develop your own knowledge and technique based on your own experience with your own camera.  

    In the landscape photography workshops that I lead, I try to educate people on the digital camera characteristics which lead to certain shooting practices, and it all varies with the size of your sensor as well (full frame vs. APS-C "crop sensor").  While digital photography has a few extra concerns to consider (digital noise, reduced dynamic range and so on),  your success on a given day or sunset/sunrise event can still go way up for most people compared to film if you use appropriate shooting technique and because you typically have more control over the post-processing end as well.

    Sorry for the rather long-winded response, but I hope this has been helpful.  I've also rewritten and expanded my notes on taking shots like this in a new post this morning.

  30. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Thanks +Mark Seibold, I was actually composing a long response to that question when you posted your comment, and I expanded on my answer in a new post this morning: https://plus.google.com/107459220492917008623/posts/8ASZyhX3Uht
    These sunset moon rise opportunities where the moon exposure balances out with the landscape happen every month, and can be anticipated.  The app +The Photographer's Ephemeris lets you see the moon rise and sun set times and the compass direction to the moon and sun at any time of day from your designated shooting position, all visible on a detailed +Google Earth satellite map.  Here's a blog post of mine, describing that process:
    Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments
    http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/09/07/anticipating-sun-and-moon-alignments/

    Lately I've been pursuing time-lapse video from moon rise events, such as the four clips I've featured at these links:
    http://youtu.be/GSXu9l4g7t8
    http://www.tout.com/m/wp2vuq
    http://www.tout.com/m/icxcz7
    https://vimeo.com/58408189

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