How to Photograph the Moon
Hello everyone and welcome back for some photography tips! As you all know we just had a Supermoon here on April 26th, also referred to as the “Pink Moon" and let me tell you, it was GORGEOUS. For some background info, a “supermoon” is when a full, or new, moon is 90% closer to Earth making it seem bigger than normal. Although I was a little bummed out it wasn’t actually pink, it was nothing a little Light Room editing couldn’t fix. After getting so much feedback on the pictures I just wanted to put a little blog together to show you guys how I took a picture of the moon!
As soon as I heard there was going to be a Supermoon I headed over to BorrowLenses.com to rent a lens big enough to shoot with. Now, you can take a nice clean picture of the moon with any telephoto lens that is about 300mm or longer, but me being excessive, I rented a 800mm lens to make sure I get a real close up clear picture. To give you a perspective of just how large this lens is, I normally shoot on a 35mm lens. This was my first time renting a lens and it was totally worth it. There would never be a reason I would need to buy a lens this big unless I was constantly taking photos of the sky and wildlife in the jungle. The lens came packed up nicely with the return label already included so that I could easily drop it off at UPS on the return date.
After taking a couple practice shots of the moon and a couple random pictures in San Francisco, Rayna and I were ready to shoot the moon! We headed out to Santa Cruz Monday evening and set up a tripod and bonfire on the beach to wait for the moon the peak over the mountains. As soon as she did, she lit up the entire beach making the sky look like dusk time! Since the moon was so bright there was no need for a low shutter speed or a high ISO, but with the lens being so long the tripod was definitely necessary to be able to hold the camera still. I followed the Looney 11 rule, which is a exercise created by photographers to photograph the moon. Basically you set your aperture at f/11 and coincide your shutter speed with your ISO. So if my shutter speed was 1/100 of a second, my ISO was 100. Or if it was 1/200 of a second my ISO was 200 and so on. Once shot, I took the photos into LightRoom to add the Pink effect! With a simple slide of the tint to the pink side and saturation the Moon was perfect.
Now I know you are all thinking “well that’s cool but when am I going to see another supermoon?”. Funny enough, there is going to be another Supermoon Wednesday, May 26th! This will be the last Supermoon of the year and will actually be a total eclipse. They call this a “Super Full Blood Moon”, kind of a badass name no? Since my last lens was so close up, for this next one coming up I am considering renting a 600mm and lower lens to get more foreground in my photos.
I hope this gave some insight on how to take some unique and diverse photos and if you already have some pictures of the moon I would love to see them! You can send them to our Instagram account @onbrandtravels. I hope to see you guys all next month taking photos of the next Supermoon, until next time!
With love,
Brandon
