When

Weath­er per­mit­ting — always a con­sid­er­a­tion in Half Moon Bay — I am invit­ing cam­era folk to join me in pho­tograph­ing the near full moon ris­ing behind the John­ston House on Thurs­day, August 30. I plan to be set­up by 7:00pm and expect the moon to appear by 7:25 and the sun set­ting at 7:40.

Where

The Pho­tog­ra­pher’s Ephemeris tells me to be near the inter­sec­tion of Main Street and Hig­gins Canyon Road look­ing east toward the house.

Camera Tips

The moon is no larg­er on the hori­zon than it is when direct­ly over­head. In order to increase the per­ceived size of the moon, you pho­to­graph it along side a land­mark, from a dis­tance and with a long lens, zoom­ing in as much as you can to frame the pic­ture. I have a 70–300mm lens but will be using my 70–200mm instead. It is a high­er qual­i­ty lens that gives me sharp­er pic­tures. More megapix­els in your cam­era helps when crop­ping to retain a high res­o­lu­tion pho­to­graph. I use a Nikon D7000 with 16MP but have tak­en decent pho­tos with the 10MP D80.

Exposure

Expo­sure is a bit tricky. You might think that an evening shot would require a wider aper­ture or a slow­er shut­ter speed, but the moon can be very bright in a dark sky and to retain crater detail, an under exposed pic­ture (accord­ing to the cam­er­a’s light meter) might be best.

The pic­ture below was tak­en with the D80 and the 70–300mm lens at 100 ISO, f/8.0 aper­ture and 1/50 shut­ter speed. The orig­i­nal pic­ture was both under exposed for the house and hills and a bit over­ex­posed for the moon and the sky. I then, using Light­room,  light­ened the bot­tom half and dark­ened the sky which brought out details in both. Brack­et­ing your expo­sure and lay­er­ing via HDR should improve that process.

Some folks sug­gest start­ing at f/16 with a shut­ter speed equal to your ISO set­ting. Those are fast shut­ter speeds, but use a tri­pod any­way. And be ready to man­u­al­ly adjust your set­tings, as the moon ris­es quick­ly. In the bay area, the earth is spin­ning around 818 mph which give you only a few min­utes to catch a shot like this.

But the Full Moon is on Friday

It sure is. Those pesky moun­tains block our view of the hori­zon and, in this case, the moon does­n’t appear until 26 min­utes after the actu­al rise. Since the sun sets as the moon ris­es, by the time we see it, the sun is long gone. By shoot­ing the day before the full­ness, you can get some of that gold­en hour sun­set light on the John­ston House and less extreme con­trast in your expo­sure.

Update: Local SF and noc­tur­nal pho­tog­ra­ph­er Phil McGrew sug­gests the “Lunar 11” rule. Start with an f stop of 11 and a shut­ter speed the same as your ISO set­ting, sim­i­lar to the “Sun­ny 16” rule which is to start with f/16 and shut­ter speed the same as your ISO when in a very sun­ny envi­ron­ment.

Update 2: Despite per­fect­ly clear evenings the pre­vi­ous 2 nights, the marine lay­er blan­ket­ed the coast with low lying clouds and we saw nei­ther the blue moon rise or the sun set. Next month is anoth­er sto­ry when, on Sep­tem­ber 29, full moon ris­es 24 min­utes before the sun­sets and may be the best pho­to op here in Half Moon Bay.